That dreadful, crazy If-It's-Literatue-It-Must-Be-Fiction compulsion strikes again in American publishing. The victim this time is Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories," which has just been published by the New York Review of Books, as part of its NYRB Classics collection. To judge by the one so-called story excerpted here,my suspicion that these would not really be stories but fuelleitons or chronicles was quite justified. The excerpt, "Good Morning, Giantess!" is in fact a classical chronicle, amounting to a poetically celebratory description of morning in the city, as people are heading in to work. Not a hint of fiction-making in it. Then why, why bury this under the "safe," homogenizing mantle of fiction rather that use it to help clear a much-need space in our culture for literary nonfiction?
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