Susan Bernofsky is professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts and director of the literary translation program in Columbia’s MFA Writing Program. She has translated more than twenty books.

“An accurate, independent, and well-researched English life . . . There is a delicacy in [Bernofsky’s] approach, a will-to-kindness, an openness to other, previously rejected possibilities.”—Michael Hofmann, New York Review of Books“A diligent biography . . . [Walser’s] miniatures account for some of the most sublimely joyful writing of the past century . . . Ms. Bernofsky wants to peer behind the smiling naïf to better glimpse the lonely, erratic artist.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street JournalFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography  “In this nuanced, astute, and revelatory biography, Susan Bernofsky gives us Walser the man—mysterious, intellectually adventuresome, humble, an artist of the first order. So, too, is Bernofsky's exceptional book: of the first order.”—Hilton Als“Susan Bernofsky's deep and decades-long involvement with Robert Walser's work has resulted in a meticulously researched, lively narrative and astute critical study of this complex and appealing writer. Clairvoyant of the Small is one of the best biographies I've read in a long time.”—Lydia Davis“Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days.”—Eileen Myles“A parade of exclamation marks, please, for the tremendous and tender work of this biography. Susan Bernofsky illuminates the life of Robert Walser, bit by bit, and by gentle lamplight, so that details aren't washed out, or complexities flattened—a slyly marvelous, and honest, approach.”—Rivka Galchen“Absolutely an incomparable biography—Bernofsky liberates the great twentieth-century writer from the asylum—revealing the understated grandeur of his literature of walking, vocabulary of a painted world, and subtle grammar of human foibles." —Josiah McElheny