Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Playful reflections on humanity and art. A quest for the essential and voyage into the minute.

Robert Musil (1880–1942), born in Vienna, was trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist, engineer, and philosopher. During WWI, he served as an officer in the Austrian Army on the Italian front. He died exiled and impoverished in Switzerland in 1942. Author of The Man Without Qualities, Young Törless, and Five Women, Musil is one of the towering pillars of twentieth-century modernism.

Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Peter Altenberg’s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, published by Penguin Classics.