“I think I’ve written this scene before, but I’ll write it once again.” – So begins Robert Walser in his short story The Boat, before depicting a magical scene of two impassioned lovers. This story of love is lovingly read by Roberta Allen.
As a woman sleeps in a jungle hut next to her lover, her mind meets myriad of the jungle’s creatures – ants, beetles, maggots, peccaries – and she becomes one of them… Hear Roberta Allen read a pivotal chapter from her novel The Dreaming Girl.
In “The Maid,” the great Swiss writer Robert Walser encapsulates an entire epic in a few short paragraphs. A master of concision, irony and playfulness, Walser would seem a natural fit for Roberta Allen, who reads one of her favorite of his stories.
Do places have a reality in and of themselves, or are they always what we imagine them to be? In “Africa,” a story from the The Daughter, a novella in short stories, Roberta Allen creates her own Africa amidst the wildness and wreckage of vacant city lots.
yellowchair
