The Storyteller Essays

Description

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.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin influenced many of his contemporaries, including Bertolt Brecht, Gershom Scholem, and Theodor Adorno. Benjamin's best-known essays include "The Task of the Translator," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 1940, he committed suicide in Portbou, on the French-Spanish border, when his attempt to escape Nazi forces was thwarted. Tess Lewis is a writer and translator of French and German literature. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Lutz Seiler, Alois Hotsching, and many others. She won the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her work on Maja Haderlap's novel Angel of Oblivion. She lives in Bronxville, New York. Samuel Titan is the director of the Instituto Moreira Salles, a nonprofit organization based in Rio de Janeiro.

"[T]he newly published collection The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, marks a unique achievement. . . . It provides a brief intellectual history of an essay and revivifies it" -Clint Williamson, Full Stop "[B]ecause it is delivered without panic, quietly, in graceful sentences, from within the culture of books and criticism, it is hard at first to accept the implications of what Benjamin is saying. You suspect he is being bombastic in order for him to come back later and tell you what modern literature's saving grace is, but the moment of redemption does not arrive. . . . Reading such claims over eighty years later, we might be reminded that every generation foresees a crisis and the end of the world as we know it. It is also possible that Benjamin had his eyes wide open at the beginning of our era and proved able to observe its salient features."-Philip O Ceallaigh, The Stinging Fly