The Assistant

Robert Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878 and worked as a bank clerk before becoming a writer. In 1929 he was diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ and lived the last twenty years of his life in hospital. His novels include Jakob von Gunten and The Assistant. Robert Walser died in 1956.'A truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer' — Susan SontagSusan Bernofsky is the translator of books by Robert Walser, Gregor von Rezzori, Yoko Tawada, and others. Her translations have appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe, and is the recipient of a PEN Translation grant and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She is also the recipient of the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Outstanding Translation for her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's The Old Child & Other Stories. She lives with her husband in Boiceville, New York.