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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin influenced many of his contemporaries, including Bertolt Brecht, Gershom Scholem, and Theodor Adorno. Benjamin's best-known essays include The Task of the Translator, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Theses on the Philosophy of History. In 1940, he committed suicide in Portbou, on the French-Spanish border, when his attempt to escape Nazi forces was thwarted. Tess Lewis is a writer and translator of French and German literature. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Lutz Seiler, Alois Hotsching, and many others. She won the 2017 PEN Translation Prize for her work on Maja Haderlap's novel Angel of Oblivion. She lives in Bronxville, New York. Samuel Titan is the director of the Instituto Moreira Salles, a nonprofit organization based in Rio de Janeiro.
[T]he newly published collection The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, marks a unique achievement. . . . It provides a brief intellectual history of an essay and revivifies it --Clint Williamson, Full Stop [B]ecause it is delivered without panic, quietly, in graceful sentences, from within the culture of books and criticism, it is hard at first to accept the implications of what Benjamin is saying. You suspect he is being bombastic in order for him to come back later and tell you what modern literature's saving grace is, but the moment of redemption does not arrive. . . . Reading such claims over eighty years later, we might be reminded that every generation foresees a crisis and the end of the world as we know it. It is also possible that Benjamin had his eyes wide open at the beginning of our era and proved able to observe its salient features. --Philip O Ceallaigh, The Stinging Fly
