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."The Storyteller" is one of Walter Benjamin's most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence-and the product of at least a decade's work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin's thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own-texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by "the incomparable Hebel" with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.

IntroductionTHE STORYTELLER ESSAYSIntroduction Johann Peter Hebel The Crisis of the Novel: On Döblin's Berlin AlexanderplatzMulberry Omelet The Lisbon Earthquake Oskar Maria Graf as Storyteller On Proverbs The Handkerchief Storytelling and Healing Reading Novels The Art of Storytelling By the Fire Experience and Poverty The StorytellerESSAYS BY OTHERSSilence and Mirror by Ernst Bloch The Giant's Toy as Legend by Ernst BlochThe Embroidery of Marie Monnier by Paul Valéry From Theory of the Novel by Georg LukácsOn Sadness by Michel de Montaigne From Histories by Herodotus From The Treasure Chest of the Rhenish Family-Friendby Johann Peter Hebel