Download or read book A Kafkaesque Memoir written by Dennis McCort and published by PalmArtPress. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kafkaesque Memoir is that rarity in the psychological literature: a patient's account of the complete arc of his own psychoanalysis from first session to last. It is the memoir of a literature professor who walks into a psychotherapist's office one day seeking a quick hypnotherapy fix for a driving phobia and ends up staying for a nine-year Jungian analysis that fundamentally transforms him. Looking back on his recently completed analysis, the professor recreates his near-decade-long conversation with his analyst, a dialogue that gradually unearths the roots of a deep sense of guilt he feels over an "abandoned child." This personal psychological drama unfolds in the context of certain cultural themes that have woven themselves deeply into the professor's nexus of values over a lifetime and profoundly shaped his worldview. These include: the strange parables of Franz Kafka, Zen Buddhism in America, French deconstruction, the roots of psychoanalysis in German culture and the nature and philosophical questioning of analysis itself. The enigmatic writings of Kafka, in particular, become a kind of fictive code used by the professor to probe his deepest conflicts. As the story of a long-term analysis that moves gradually through the stages of the professor's angry defensive posturing and religio-philosophical jousting to a deep mutual sympathy between patient and doctor, the book is rich in intellectual and emotional substance; but, in the professor's recalling of key life events, it offers as well a full-bodied social canvas of its time: there are, for instance, chapters that tell of a close encounter with the mafia in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, crashing a party in early 70's Harlem and navigating the underground counterculture of mid-70's Los Angeles. Personal struggle, the dance of analysis and the contemporary culture wars intersect in this absorbing tale of a man's late-life quest to heal a deeply divided self.
Download or read book Kafkaesque Fourteen Stories written by Franz Kafka and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Silver Reuben Award for Graphic Novels A Boston Globe and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year In Kafkaesque, Peter Kuper combines stunning artistic technique with shrewd political and social commentary for a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Franz Kafka short stories.
Download or read book Kafka s Last Trial written by Benjamin Balint and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel? At once a brilliant biographical portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts - brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled with Kafka's papers at the last possible moment from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It describes a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a fascinating and hotly contested trial. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question: who owns a literary legacy - the country of one's language and birth or of one's cultural and religious affinities - and what nation can claim a right to it.
Download or read book Kafka Comes to America written by Steven Wax and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Franz Kafka written by Franz Kafka and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire"--Publisher marketing.
Download or read book Is that Kafka 99 Finds written by Reiner Stach and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the massive research for an authoritative 1,500-page biography emerges this wunderkammer of 99 delightfully odd facts about Kafka In the course of compiling his highly acclaimed three-volume biography of Kafka, while foraying to libraries and archives from Prague to Israel, Reiner Stach made one astounding discovery after another: unexpected photographs, inconsistencies in handwritten texts, excerpts from letters, and testimonies from Kafka’s contemporaries that shed surprising light on his personality and his writing. Is that Kafka? presents the crystal granules of the real Kafka: he couldn’t lie, but he tried to cheat on his high-school exams; bitten by the fitness fad, he avidly followed the regime of a Danish exercise guru; he drew beautifully; he loved beer; he read biographies voraciously; he made the most beautiful presents, especially for children; odd things made him cry or made him furious; he adored slapstick. Every discovery by Stach turns on its head the stereotypical version of the tortured neurotic—and as each one chips away at the monolithic dark Kafka, the keynote, of all things, becomes laughter. For Is that Kafka? Stach has assembled 99 of his most exciting discoveries, culling the choicest, most entertaining bits, and adding his knowledge-able commentaries. Illustrated with dozens of previously unknown images, this volume is a singular literary pleasure.
Download or read book Konundrum written by Franz Kafka and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers. Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer's Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)
Download or read book Going beyond the Pairs written by Dennis McCort and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2001-06-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Going beyond the Pairs, Dennis McCort examines the theme of the coincidentia oppositorum—the tendency of a thing or relationship to turn, under certain conditions, into its own opposite—as it is expressed in German Romanticism, Zen Buddhism, and deconstruction. McCort argues that the coincidentia can be useful for understanding and comparing a variety of cultural forms, including systems of myth, religions ancient and modern, laws of social organization, speculative philosophies East and West, psychological theories and therapeutic practices, and dynamic organizing principles of music, art, and literature. The book touches on a variety of Western and Eastern writers and thinkers, including Thomas Merton, Jacques Derrida, Nishida Kitaro, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Franz Kafka, Novalis, Renzai Zen, J. D. Salinger, and the mysterious, doughnut-loving editor of the medieval Chinese koan collection, Mumonkan.
Download or read book Introducing Kafka written by David Zane Mairowitz and published by Totem Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, helping us to see beyond the cliche 'Kafkaesque', is illustrated by legendary underground artist Robert Crumb.
Download or read book Letters to Friends Family and Editors written by Franz Kafka and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924. Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, these letters, collected after Kafka's death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.
Download or read book Kafka written by Reiner Stach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eagerly anticipated final volume of the award-winning, definitive biography of Franz Kafka How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach’s narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka’s life. The book’s richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod. The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka’s wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest—his predilection for the back-to-nature movement—stemmed from his “nervous” surroundings rather than personal eccentricity. The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.
Download or read book The Burrow written by Franz Kafka and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening, strange and visionary short fiction After Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka's wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed. This fiction included not only The Castle and The Trial but also the amazingly varied, chilling and ingenious short works collected in The Burrow and Other Stories. These tales, some little more than a page, others much more substantial, are among the greatest works of Central European literature. They vary from the tiny and horrifying 'Little Fable' to the elaborate waking nightmares of 'Building the Great Wall of China' and the title story 'The Burrow', where an unidentified creature describes its creation of an endlessly elaborate burrow to protect itself from unidentified enemies, but with every trap or tunnel only creating further terrors and uncertainty.
Download or read book Kafka written by Reiner Stach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I. Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.
Download or read book Checkpoint written by David Albahari and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be. Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment. Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war. Praise for Checkpoint: "A satirical take on war in the vein of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, Serbian author David Albahari’s Checkpointis shocking and comic in equal turns, skillfully pulled together by the force of Albahari’s wit.... Visceral, wild, and often hilarious, Checkpoint is a dark delight." —Ho Lin, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review “A worthy descendant of The Good Soldier Svejk and Catch-22.” —Kirkus Reviews “Checkpoint is a tornado of a book. David Albahari, a noted Serbian author who lives in Canada, muscles this Kafkaesque short novel into the war-is-absurd literary tradition in one tremendous 183-page paragraph…. Stylistically, JP Donleavy and Gary Shteyngart come to mind at times, while imagistically one might think of Goya, Picasso, or the Surrealists. But Albahari has a distinctive voice, and it comes through vividly in Ellen Elias-Bursać’s able translation from the Serbian.” —Jon Sobel, Blogcritics “Between adventure and apocalypse... Kafka and Kubrick...combining in grotesque-comical manner all the ridiculousness, beauty, horror, subtlety and extravagance that literature can hold.“ —Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Download or read book Mediamorphosis written by Shai Biderman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of a visual manifestation of the work of Franz Kafka was denied by many—first and foremost by Kafka himself, who famously urged his publisher to avoid an image of an insect on the cover of Metamorphosis. Be that as it may, it is unlikely that such a central progenitor of twentieth-century art and thought as Kafka can be fully understood without reference to the revolutionary artistic medium of his century: cinema. Mediamorphosis compiles articles by some of today's leading forces in the scholarship of Kafka as well as film studies to provide a thorough investigation of the reciprocal relations between Kafka's work and the cinematic medium. The volume approaches the theoretical integration of Kafka and cinema via such issues as the cinematic qualities in Kafka's prose and the possibility of a visual manifestation of the Kafkaesque. Alongside these debates, the book investigates the capacity of cinema to incorporate and express the unique qualities of a Kafkaesque world through an analysis of cinematic adaptations of Kafka's prose, such as Michael Haneke's The Castle (1997) and Straub-Huillet's Class Relations (1984), as well as films that carry a more subtle relation to Kafka's oeuvre, such as the cinematic works of David Cronenberg, the films of the Coen brothers, Chris Marker's "film-essay," Charlie Chaplin's tramp, and others.
Download or read book I Will Never See the World Again written by Ahmet Altan and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of the Year – Bloomberg News A resilient Turkish writer’s inspiring account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism. The destiny I put down in my novel has become mine. I am now under arrest like the hero I created years ago. I await the decision that will determine my future, just as he awaited his. I am unaware of my destiny, which has perhaps already been decided, just as he was unaware of his. I suffer the pathetic torment of profound helplessness, just as he did. Like a cursed oracle, I foresaw my future years ago not knowing that it was my own. Confined in a cell four meters long, imprisoned on absurd, Kafkaesque charges, novelist Ahmet Altan is one of many writers persecuted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s oppressive regime. In this extraordinary memoir, written from his prison cell, Altan reflects upon his sentence, on a life whittled down to a courtyard covered by bars, and on the hope and solace a writer’s mind can provide, even in the darkest places.
Download or read book Letters to Milena written by Franz Kafka and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into a passionate but doomed epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifter and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
