Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth.

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories

This is the first major collection of short stories from the legendary German–Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin is best known for his groundbreaking studies on culture and literature, including the collections Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project, but here for the first time are gathered his experiments in fiction, with forms including novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables, and riddles.

As well as highlighting the themes that run throughout his work, the collection demonstrates that his singular style could create extraor-dinary imaginative worlds that will delight those who are fascinated by his thinking, as well as readers of literary fiction such as Franz Kafka and Stefan Zweig and the uncanny tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

This collection is translated and edited by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.