Search results for ""author franz kafka""

'You are the knife I turn inside myself'Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writerKafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech. Their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience.While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.

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One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten. Thus begins "The Meowmorphosis" - a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Kafka's classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Zombies!" Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and discovers that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? And how can Gregor be so selfish as to devote all his attention to a scrap of ribbon? As his new feline identity threatens to eat away at his personality, Gregor desperately tries to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal by accomplishing the one thing he never could as a man: He must flee his parents' house.

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Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.This Modern Library edition collects Stanley Corngold’s acclaimed English translation—long hailed as the gold standard b

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On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

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Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and in this open letter to his father - a letter which was never sent - Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, "Dearest Father" is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent and highly conflicted relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him, Kafka's inspired work is one of the most lucid and touching psychological documents of the twentieth century.

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A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening and visionary short fictionStrange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Some are less than a page long, others more substantial; all were unpublished in his lifetime. These matchless short works range from the gleeful miniature horror 'Little Fable' to the off-kilter humour of 'Investigations of a Dog', and from the elaborate waking nightmare of 'Building the Great Wall of China' to the creeping unease of 'The Burrow', where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

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A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

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This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

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This Norton Critical Edition is based on new translations by leading Kafka scholar and translator Stanley Corngold. Thirty stories are included, accompanied by detailed annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" offers a glimpse of Kafka’s creative process through extracts from his letters, diaries, and conversations. "Criticism" collects ten essays on the major stories by Stanley Corngold, Danielle Allen, Walter Hinderer, Walter Sokel, Nicola Gess, Vivian Liska, Benno Wagner, John A. Hargraves, and Gerhard Kurz. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

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When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, ‘The Metamorphosis’ is accompanied in this volume by a selection of other classic tales and sketches by Kafka – such as ‘The Judgement’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Country Doctor’ – all presented in a lively and meticulous new translation by Christopher Moncrieff.

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A collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by Michael HofmannKafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, the story of an ordinary man transformed into an insect, is brought together in this collection with the rest of his works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Contemplation, a collection of his earlier short studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and an eyewitness account of an air display. Together, these stories, fragments and miniature gems reveal the breadth of his vision, his sense of the absurd, and above all his acute, uncanny wit. Translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann

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'...behind them all was New York, looking at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers' Entering New York harbour, the young immigrant Karl Rossmann sees the Statue of Liberty, 'her arm with the sword stretched upward'. This forbidding introduction sets the tone for Kafka's narrative about an innocent European astray in an ultra-modern America that is both a fantasy and an object of social satire. Expelled by his family after seduction by a maidservant, Karl finds in America a series of surrogate families, but he continues to get into undeserved trouble and is forced to move on once again. Along the way Karl encounters extremes of wealth and poverty, experiences the cruelty of the American work ethic, and has glimpses of the criminal underworld, without losing the basic goodness and resourcefulness that enable him to survive the hazards of the New World. Full of incident, and blackly humorous, Kafka's first novel portrays American civilization with horrified fascination. This edition retains Kafka's distinctive style in a sensitive and natural new translation, together with a penetrating introduction and notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'The supreme fabulist of modern man's cosmic predicament' John Updike 'The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic' New York Times The essential stories of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers No one has captured the modern experience, its wild dreams, strange joys, its neuroses and boredom, better than Franz Kafka. His vision, with its absurdity and twisted humour, has lost none of its force or relevance today. This essential collection, translated and selected by Alexander Starritt, casts fresh light on Kafka's genius. Alongside brutal depictions of violence and justice are jokes and deceptively slight, mysterious fables. These unforgettable pieces reflect the brilliance at the core of Franz Kafka, arguably most fully expressed within his short stories. Together they showcase a writer of unmatched imaginative depth, capable of expressing the most profound reality with a wry smile. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe Translated by Alexander Starritt Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to Jewish parents in Prague and wrote in German. He published only a few story collections and individual stories in literary magazines during his lifetime. The rest of his work was published posthumously. He is now considered one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

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Long fascinated with the work of Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper began illustrating his stories in 1988. Initially drawn to the master’s dark humour, Kuper adapted the stories over the years to plumb their deeper truths. Working from new translations of the classic texts, Kuper has reimagined these iconic stories for the twenty-first century, using setting and perspective to comment on contemporary issues. Long-time lovers of Kafka will appreciate Kuper’s innovative interpretations, while Kafka novices will discover a haunting introduction to some of the great writer’s most beguiling stories. Kafkaesque stands somewhere between adaptation and wholly original creation, going beyond a simple illustration of Kafka’s words to become a stunning work of art.

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'Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who's standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.' Joshua Cohen, from his preface to He: Shorter Writings of Franz KafkaThis is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo and a diary entry, also including popular favourites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka's preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food and exercise, each in his signature style.Cohen's selection emphasises the stately structure of utterly coherent logic, within an utterly incoherent illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator, but the absence of the universe's only reliable narrator. Who is God.

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This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

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'If I think about it, and I have the time and inclination and capacity to do so, we dogs are an odd lot.'How does a dog see the world? How do any of us? In this playful and enigmatic story of a canine philosopher, Kafka explores the limits of knowledge. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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