A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to
his famous essay, The Storyteller, this collection includes short
stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other
authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work. Walter Benjamin's The
Storyteller is among the greatest and most widely read essays of this
ever-suggestive but also enigmatic master thinker. Published in 1936 in an
obscure Swiss review, The Storyteller was the product of at least a
decade of ongoing reflection and composition. What might be called the
story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, when Benjamin wrote an
essay about one of his favorite authors, the German romantic Johann Peter
Hebel, and then continues in a beautiful series of short essays, book
reviews (of Arnold Bennett's novel The Old Wives' Tale, among others),
short stories, parables (The Handkerchief, written in Ibiza in
1932-1933), and even radio shows for children (The Earthquake in Lisbon).
In this new collection these writings are brought together in one place,
giving us a new appreciation of how Benjamin's thinking changed and ripened
over time. These superb and wonderfully readable pieces are further
accompanied by some key readings of his own--texts by his contemporaries
Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Jean Paulhan; by Paul Valery; and by
Herodotus and Montaigne--and finally, to bring things around, there are two
short stories by the incomparable Hebel with whom Benjamin's intellectual
adventure began. Tess Lewis's magnificent new translation further refreshes
our understanding of the work, while editor Samuel Titan's introduction
fills in the biographical and intellectual context in which Benjamin's The
Storyteller came to life--