Synopses & Reviews
The best-known novellas and stories of one of the seminal writers of the twentieth century. Included are "The Judgment, " "A Country Doctor, " and "A Hunger Artist." New Foreword by Anne Rice.
Synopsis
From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial A collection that brings together the stories he allowed to be published during his lifetime, including his best-known tale of a man who wakes up transformed into an insect.
To Max Brod, his literary executor, Kafka wrote: "Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these."
"Kafka's survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: 'With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.' There is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ('What have I in common with Jews?') has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now." --Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth and On Beauty
Synopsis
This collection brings together the stories that Kafka allowed to be published during his lifetime. To Max Brod, his literary executor, he wrote: “Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these.”
About the Author
Franz Kafka was born in 1833 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The younger Kafka's feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of his work and are made explicit in his "Letter to His Father" (excerpted in this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent. Kafka was educated in the German language schools of Prague and at the city's German University, where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka's close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod, Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his story "The Stoker" won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on
The Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did appear:
The Judgment (1916),
The Metamorphosis (1916),
The Penal Colony (1919), and
The Country Doctor (1919). Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish Kafka's writings. To this act of "betrayal" the world owes the preservation of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our century.
From the Paperback edition.
Table of Contents
Conversation with the supplicant -- Meditation -- The judgment -- The metamorphosis -- A country doctor -- In the penal colony -- A hunger artist.