For me the sketches I produce now & then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one & it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself. One of the great writers of the twentieth century
- & an important influence on Kafka
- comes to light in this selection of the best of his short fictions. Through his protagonists
- young men of modest means famous artists society women animals endowed with the gift of speech
- Robert Walser captures the dislocated unease of life in early twentieth-century Europe.