EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Essential Kafka

Download or read book The Essential Kafka written by Franz Kafka and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A culturally-influential and celebrated author, Kafka is generally considered to be one of the most accomplished writers of the 20th century. In this boxed set are collected together three of his major works, including the maginificent 'Metamorphosis and Other Stories'.

Book The Complete Stories

    Book Details:
  • Author : Flannery O'Connor
  • Publisher : Macmillan
  • Release : 1971
  • ISBN : 0374515360
  • Pages : 581 pages

Download or read book The Complete Stories written by Flannery O'Connor and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1971 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Book Necessary Angels

Download or read book Necessary Angels written by Robert Alter and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture. Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

Book Kafka  The Definitive Guide

Download or read book Kafka The Definitive Guide written by Neha Narkhede and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every enterprise application creates data, whether it’s log messages, metrics, user activity, outgoing messages, or something else. And how to move all of this data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. If you’re an application architect, developer, or production engineer new to Apache Kafka, this practical guide shows you how to use this open source streaming platform to handle real-time data feeds. Engineers from Confluent and LinkedIn who are responsible for developing Kafka explain how to deploy production Kafka clusters, write reliable event-driven microservices, and build scalable stream-processing applications with this platform. Through detailed examples, you’ll learn Kafka’s design principles, reliability guarantees, key APIs, and architecture details, including the replication protocol, the controller, and the storage layer. Understand publish-subscribe messaging and how it fits in the big data ecosystem. Explore Kafka producers and consumers for writing and reading messages Understand Kafka patterns and use-case requirements to ensure reliable data delivery Get best practices for building data pipelines and applications with Kafka Manage Kafka in production, and learn to perform monitoring, tuning, and maintenance tasks Learn the most critical metrics among Kafka’s operational measurements Explore how Kafka’s stream delivery capabilities make it a perfect source for stream processing systems

Book KAFKA Essential

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Kafka
  • Publisher : Lebooks Editora
  • Release : 2024-04-01
  • ISBN : 6558943131
  • Pages : 95 pages

Download or read book KAFKA Essential written by Franz Kafka and published by Lebooks Editora. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Kafka is widely recognized as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Associated with expressionism and existentialism, his literary creations managed to encompass themes as complex as the condition of contemporary man, anguish, guilt, bureaucracy, frustration, and loneliness, among others. In this volume of Essential Kafka, the reader has access to two important works to better understand the talent and life of this extraordinary writer: "Letter to His Father" is an intimate and profound text that takes us into Kafka's very heart and many of the reasons and inspirations for his work. It is essential for anyone who wants to understand Kafka's work better and, in general, the life of the writer. The short story "A Hunger Artist" explores familiar themes in Kafka's poetic, such as death, isolation, art, asceticism, spiritual poverty, futility, or personal failure, all within a widespread corruption of human relationships. Nothing more Kafkaesque! These works offer a deep and thoughtful insight into Kafka's world and mind, inviting the reader to explore the darkest and most complex aspects of human existence.

Book The Basic Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Kafka
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 1979
  • ISBN : 067153145X
  • Pages : 340 pages

Download or read book The Basic Kafka written by Franz Kafka and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1979 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published together for the first time are selections from all Kafka's writings: The Metamorphosis, Josephine The Singer, plus his short stories, parables, and his personal diaries and letters.

Book Essential Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Phillip Lundberg
  • Publisher : AuthorHouse
  • Release : 2009-06-12
  • ISBN : 1438990227
  • Pages : 319 pages

Download or read book Essential Kafka written by Phillip Lundberg and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-06-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Judgment, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Report to the Academy, A Country Doctor, The Burrow, Investigations of a Dog or On Substance, Hunger Artist, Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk; Josef K.!, The Messenger & Nocturnal Deliberations -a newly expanded Second Edition (9 Stories & 3 Novel Excerpts) with a Postscript on the Translator's Art. This translation of Kafka has a dual purpose, for starters it intends to provide English readers with a much better translation: that Kafka's prose should find a more fitting analogy in modern (American) English whereby it should come to life to a greater degree, and that his underlying philosophy—and I say philosophy in the greater sense—thus, should be grasped more readily. The second purpose is to explore issues regarding translation per se: what is the proper role of the translator and why is it that the vast majority of translations tend to leave the typical reader perplexed and, quite frankly, dissatisfied? The stories and excerpts included in this second edition have been carefully chosen to really bring the reader to the core issues that make manifest Kafka’s literary genius. This book also contains a short postscript on the art of translation that argues against the current modus operandi of translation theory, indeed, it goes so far as to quote from Kafka's diaries—on his state of mind in composing—as well as from Schleiermacher and early Roman translators on the responsibility of the translator to capture the spirit of the work in an imaginative manner. Kafka was struggling in his writings with matters that go beyond the normal concerns and my intention in this translation is to remain true to Kafka’s aims. Thus, this translation may prove valuable not only for the general readership but likewise for those who wish to study the intricacies of translation of text that deals with the most important matters. All the same, one should never neglect the humorous side and the joy to be discovered in having the last laugh.

Book The Essential Kafka Boxed Set

Download or read book The Essential Kafka Boxed Set written by Franz Kafka and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Franz Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stanley Corngold
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2018-03-15
  • ISBN : 1501722824
  • Pages : 401 pages

Download or read book Franz Kafka written by Stanley Corngold and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Stanley Corngold’s view, the themes and strategies of Kafka’s fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka’s work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka’s art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka’s rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka’s distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka’s fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

Book Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Reiner Stach
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2021-07-13
  • ISBN : 069123356X
  • Pages : 592 pages

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.

Book Konundrum

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Kafka
  • Publisher : Archipelago
  • Release : 2016-11-01
  • ISBN : 0914671529
  • Pages : 384 pages

Download or read book Konundrum written by Franz Kafka and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 384 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) From the Trade Paperback edition.

Book Metamorphosis

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Kafka
  • Publisher : Librofilio
  • Release : 2024-02-02
  • ISBN : 2384613626
  • Pages : 58 pages

Download or read book Metamorphosis written by Franz Kafka and published by Librofilio. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka is a haunting and surreal exploration of existentialism and the human condition. This novella introduces readers to Gregor Samsa, a diligent traveling salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Kafka's narrative delves into the isolation, alienation, and absurdity that Gregor experiences as he grapples with his new identity. The novella is a profound examination of the individual's struggle to maintain a sense of self and belonging in a world that often feels incomprehensible. Kafka's writing is characterized by its dreamlike quality and a sense of impending doom. As Gregor's physical and emotional transformation unfolds, readers are drawn into a nightmarish world that blurs the lines between reality and illusion. "Metamorphosis" is a timeless work that continues to captivate readers with its exploration of themes such as identity, family, and the dehumanizing effects of modern society. Kafka's unique style and ability to evoke a sense of existential unease make this novella a literary classic. Step into the surreal and unsettling world of "Metamorphosis" and embark on a journey of self-discovery and existential reflection. Kafka's masterpiece challenges readers to confront the complexities of the human psyche and the enigmatic nature of existence. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-speaking novelist and short story writer whose works have had a profound influence on modern literature. Born in Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka's writing is characterized by its exploration of existentialism, alienation, and the absurdity of human existence. Kafka's most famous works include "Metamorphosis," where the protagonist wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect, and "The Trial," a nightmarish tale of a man arrested and tried by an inscrutable and oppressive bureaucracy. His writing often delves into the themes of isolation and the struggle to find meaning in an indifferent world. Despite his relatively small body of work, Kafka's impact on literature and philosophy has been immense. His writings have been interpreted in various ways, and the term "Kafkaesque" is often used to describe situations characterized by surreal complexity and absurdity. Kafka's legacy as a literary innovator and his exploration of the human psyche continue to captivate readers and scholars alike, making him a central figure in the world of modern literature.

Book Kafka Streams in Action

Download or read book Kafka Streams in Action written by Bill Bejeck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summary Kafka Streams in Action teaches you everything you need to know to implement stream processing on data flowing into your Kafka platform, allowing you to focus on getting more from your data without sacrificing time or effort. Foreword by Neha Narkhede, Cocreator of Apache Kafka Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Not all stream-based applications require a dedicated processing cluster. The lightweight Kafka Streams library provides exactly the power and simplicity you need for message handling in microservices and real-time event processing. With the Kafka Streams API, you filter and transform data streams with just Kafka and your application. About the Book Kafka Streams in Action teaches you to implement stream processing within the Kafka platform. In this easy-to-follow book, you'll explore real-world examples to collect, transform, and aggregate data, work with multiple processors, and handle real-time events. You'll even dive into streaming SQL with KSQL! Practical to the very end, it finishes with testing and operational aspects, such as monitoring and debugging. What's inside Using the KStreams API Filtering, transforming, and splitting data Working with the Processor API Integrating with external systems About the Reader Assumes some experience with distributed systems. No knowledge of Kafka or streaming applications required. About the Author Bill Bejeck is a Kafka Streams contributor and Confluent engineer with over 15 years of software development experience. Table of Contents PART 1 - GETTING STARTED WITH KAFKA STREAMS Welcome to Kafka Streams Kafka quicklyPART 2 - KAFKA STREAMS DEVELOPMENT Developing Kafka Streams Streams and state The KTable API The Processor APIPART 3 - ADMINISTERING KAFKA STREAMS Monitoring and performance Testing a Kafka Streams applicationPART 4 - ADVANCED CONCEPTS WITH KAFKA STREAMS Advanced applications with Kafka StreamsAPPENDIXES Appendix A - Additional configuration information Appendix B - Exactly once semantics

Book Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts

Download or read book Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts written by Nekula, Marek and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s “overwrote” his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka’s multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka’s Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka’s bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer’s organic language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka’s education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka read his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and nonfictional texts. ‘Nekula’s work has had a major impact on our understanding of Kafka’s relation to the complex social, cultural and linguistic environment of early twentieth‑century Prague. While little of this work has been available in English until now, the present volume translates many of his most important studies, and includes revisions and expansions appearing now for the first time. Nekula challenges stubborn clichés and opens important new perspectives: readers interested in questions relating to Kafka and Prague will find this an essential and richly rewarding book.’ – Peter Zusi, University College London ‘Marek Nekula’s important book originally situates Franz Kafka within his Pragueand Czech contexts. It critically examines numerous distortions that accompanied the reception of Kafka, starting with the central issue of Kafka’s languages(Kafka’s Czech, Prague German), and the ideological discourse surrounding the author in communist Czechoslovakia. Astute and carefully argued, Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts offers new perspectives on the writings of the Prague author. This book will benefit readers in German and Slavic Studies, in Comparative Literature, and History of Ideas.’ – Veronika Tuckerová, Harvard University Marek Nekula připravil soubor studií o tom, jak Praha formovala Kafkovu osobnost a dílo. Kniha začíná kritickou diskuzí o problematickém přijímání Franze Kafky v Československu, které začalo na konferenci v Liblici v roce 1963. Zde byl Kafka zachráněn před cenzurou za cenu "přepsání" jeho německého a židovského literárního a kulturního kontextu s cílem vyzdvihnout český vliv na jeho tvorbu. Studie se zaměřují na židovské sociální a literární prostředí v Praze, Kafkovu německo-českou dvojjazyčnost a jeho znalost jidiš a hebrejštiny. Kafkův bilingvismus je probírán v kontextu současných esencialistických názorů na spisovatelův jazyk a identitu. Nekula také věnuje zvláštní pozornost Kafkovu vzdělání, zkoumá jeho studia českého jazyka a literatury, jakož i jeho českou četbu a její roli v jeho intelektuálním životě. Knihu uzavírá otázkou, jak Kafka „četl“ své městské prostředí.

Book Franz Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Andreas Kilcher
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2022-05-31
  • ISBN : 0300260660
  • Pages : 369 pages

Download or read book Franz Kafka written by Andreas Kilcher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to publish the entirety of Franz Kafka's graphic output, including more than 100 newly discovered drawings The year 2019 brought a sensational discovery: hundreds of drawings by the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) were found in a private collection that for decades had been kept under lock and key. Until now, only a few of Kafka's drawings were widely known. Although Kafka is renowned for his written work, his drawings are evidence of what his literary executor Max Brod termed his "double talent." Irresistible and full of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the carnivalesque, they illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Kafka's drawings span his full career, but he drew most intensively in his university years, between 1901 and 1907. An entire booklet of drawings from this period is among the many new discoveries, along with dozens of loose sheets. Published for the first time in English, these newly available materials are collected with his known works in a complete catalogue raisonné of more than 240 illustrations, reproduced in full color. Essays by Andreas Kilcher and Judith Butler provide essential background for this lavish volume, interpreting the drawings in their own right while also reconciling their place in Kafka's larger oeuvre.

Book Effective Kafka

    Book Details:
  • Author : Emil Koutanov
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2020-03-17
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 466 pages

Download or read book Effective Kafka written by Emil Koutanov and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The software architecture landscape has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Microservices have displaced monoliths. Data and applications are increasingly becoming distributed and decentralised. But composing disparate systems is a hard problem. More recently, software practitioners have been rapidly converging on event-driven architecture as a sustainable way of dealing with complexity - integrating systems without increasing their coupling.In Effective Kafka, Emil Koutanov explores the fundamentals of Event-Driven Architecture - using Apache Kafka - the world's most popular and supported open-source event streaming platform.You'll learn: - The fundamentals of event-driven architecture and event streaming platforms- The background and rationale behind Apache Kafka, its numerous potential uses and applications- The architecture and core concepts - the underlying software components, partitioning and parallelism, load-balancing, record ordering and consistency modes- Installation of Kafka and related tooling - using standalone deployments, clusters, and containerised deployments with Docker- Using CLI tools to interact with and administer Kafka classes, as well as publishing data and browsing topics- Using third-party web-based tools for monitoring a cluster and gaining insights into the event streams- Building stream processing applications in Java 11 using off-the-shelf client libraries- Patterns and best-practice for organising the application architecture, with emphasis on maintainability and testability of the resulting code- The numerous gotchas that lurk in Kafka's client and broker configuration, and how to counter them- Theoretical background on distributed and concurrent computing, exploring factors affecting their liveness and safety- Best-practices for running multi-tenanted clusters across diverse engineering teams, how teams collaborate to build complex systems at scale and equitably share the cluster with the aid of quotas- Operational aspects of running Kafka clusters at scale, performance tuning and methods for optimising network and storage utilisation- All aspects of Kafka security -including network segregation, encryption, certificates, authentication and authorization.The coverage is progressively delivered and carefully aimed at giving you a journey-like experience into becoming proficient with Apache Kafka and Event-Driven Architecture. The goal is to get you designing and building applications. And by the conclusion of this book, you will be a confident practitioner and a Kafka evangelist within your organisation - wielding the knowledge necessary to teach others.

Book The Lost Writings

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Kafka
  • Publisher : New Directions Publishing
  • Release : 2020-10-06
  • ISBN : 0811228029
  • Pages : 116 pages

Download or read book The Lost Writings written by Franz Kafka and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”