Robert Musil (1880-1942), born in Vienna, was trained as a mathematician, behavioral psychologist, engineer, and philosopher. During World War I, he served as an officer in the Austrian Army on the Italian front. He died exiled and impoverished in Switzerland in 1942. Author of The Man Without Qualities, The Confusions of Young Törless, and Five Women, Musil is one of the towering pillars of high modernism.
About the translator: Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Woods, the memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin, and a collection of short fiction, Footprints in Wet Cement. Wortsman's translations from the German include Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil, The Man Who Sold His Shadow by Adelbert von Chamisso, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm,Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, and Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka.