The Storyteller

Walter Benjamin was the interlocutor of all the demons and angels of storytelling. And this is why he knew its endless secrets. Listen to him. -- John Berger
This volume collects an extraordinary array of short pieces by Walter Benjamin that lets us see the centrality of stories, dreams, and tales to his own experimental writings. During the time in which Benjamin sought to understand the conditions of communicability between languages, he was also testing the thesis in the stories he told. Telling the tale and reflecting on its very possibility, under conditions such as war and poverty, Benjamin gives us short forms that are broken up by interruptions and sudden closure. This elegant and moving volume is beautifully edited, including an introduction that shows how these collections of short tales and dream sequences are already doing the critical work of the essay form. This volume is a marvelous gift that will reorient our reading of Benjamin in startling ways -- Judith Butler
A complex and brilliant writer. -- J.M. Coetzee
Walter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre. -- Hannah Arendt
Benjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation. his life and work speak challengingly to us all." -- Terry Eagleton
There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time. -- George Steiner
He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe. -- Susan Sontag
Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of the twentieth century. * Sunday Times *
One doesn't read him to feel better. One reads him to feel. In his universe nothing is as it appears to be and there is a vital need to go beyond surfaces and connect with humanity. -- Elif Shafak * Guardian *
The greatest German critic of the 20th century -- Stuart Jeffries * Financial Times *
Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive. -- Theodor Adorno
A circular book to visit again and again, a book one can start reading right in the middle or read backwards, playing with its chapters and sentences wildly and freely, just as the philosopher would have probably wished. -- Elif Shafak * FT *
An event. -- Jonathon Sturgeon * Guardian *
Dreams, diaries, reviews, fragments, and short fiction make up The Storyteller, but there's no denying that this potpourri by the German critic and philosopher Benjamin is an essential addition to the corpus of one of the 20th century's preeminent figures. As the translators note in an elegant introduction, these pieces explore both the European oral storytelling tradition and a curious mysticism under the aegis of modernist literature...thoroughly illuminating. * Publishers Weekly *