Blog post

Fiction and Form: Howard Caygill, Sara Salih and Matthew Charles join The Storyteller editors

Verso Books26 September 2016

Howard Caygill, Professor Of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and author of the forthcoming Kafka: In the Light of the Accident (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sara Salih, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and Matthew Charles, Lecturer in English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, joined The Storytellers editors and translators, Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski, for a special event to launch Walter Benjamin's fiction collected in English translation for the first time.


Recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting

Benjamin's stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

>>> Listen: Esther Leslie, Michael Rosen and Marina Warner speak with Gareth Evans on the Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop

>>> Listen: Walter Benjamin: Child’s Play Or A Critics’ Critic? Resonance FM podcast with Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.

>>> Read an excerpt from the translators' Introduction

>>> Notes from the Translators of Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller': 

Translation, Anxiety by Sam Dolbear 
Labours of Translation by Sebastian Truskolaski 
A Certain Task by Esther Leslie

Filed under: versopodcast