"This jeweled box of a book... float[s], wonderfully, somewhere in a land between short story and criticism."
- Randy Kennedy - The New York Times,
""Walser achieved a remarkable tone, in which perfect assurance and perfect ambiguity combine.""
- Benjamin Kunkel - The New Yorker,
""Everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him.""
- Nicholas Lazard - The Guardian,
""A Paul Klee in prose, a good-humoured, sweet Beckett, Walser is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.""
- Susan Sontag,
""Bold and idiosyncratic.""
- Lydia Davis,
""Singular—genius.""
- Ben Lerner,
""Written between 1902 and 1930 and, with two exceptions, previously untranslated, the pieces gathered here elaborate a nervous, slapstick sort of hack journalism that set the stage for a fabulously experimental modernist writing situation whose fans included Kafka, Musil, and Benjamin.""
- John Kelsey - Artforum,