Letters to Friends, Family and Editors - Hardcover

Kafka, Franz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805235000 ISBN 13: 9780805235005

Publisher: Schocken Books, 1987

Synopsis

Kafka's five-year correspondence with the woman he claimed to love reveals much about his complex personality and his literary life

About this title

Review

"Some of the most heartrending 'love letters' ever written."
--Morris Dickstein, The New York Times Book Review

"Kafka's correspondence with Felice has all the earmarks of his fiction--the same nervous attention to minute particulars, the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power, the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation--combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight. Taken together, Elias Canetti observes, the letters provide an index of the emotional events that would inspire The Trial--a novel, Canetti argues, in which Kafka's engagement to Felice is reimagined as the mysterious and menacing arrest of the hero."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

About the Author

FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked for most of his adult life at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Only a small portion of Kafka's writings were published during his lifetime. He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored.

Edition details

• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805235000
• ISBN 13: 9780805235005
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 592