The Book Beat Reading Group will not be meeting in January. The Tanners by Robert Walser will be the book discussion for the month of February. We will be meeting on Wednesday, February 23rd @ 7:00 p.m. at the Goldfish Teahouse, 117 W. Fourth Street in Downtown Royal Oak. All are welcome.
“A clairvoyant of the small” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.
“The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who…can be placed in that comic tradition [that] runs from Gogol through Kafka and down to José Saramago . . . . When Walser met Lenin in Zurich during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’ . . . It is remarkable to see what variety and richness what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker