Event Date: 22 September 2016

Keynes Library

Birkbeck School of Arts

Birkbeck University of London

43 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PD

Verso Books presents:

Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller: Fiction & Form

The Storyteller (Verso, 2016) gathers the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His 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.

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, join The Storyteller’s 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.