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family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.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 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 Kafka on the Shore written by Haruki Murakami and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-01-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes "an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and an aging simpleton. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet 15-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.” —The Chicago Tribune
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 The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka written by Carolin Duttlinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of the most influential of modern authors, whose darkly fascinating novels and stories - where themes such as power, punishment and alienation loom large - have become emblematic of modern life. This Introduction offers a clear and accessible account of Kafka's life, work and literary influence and overturns many myths surrounding them. His texts are in fact far more engaging, diverse, light-hearted and ironic than is commonly suggested by clichés of 'the Kafkaesque'. And, once explored in detail, they are less difficult and impenetrable than is often assumed. Through close analysis of their style, imagery and narrative perspective, Carolin Duttlinger aims to give readers the confidence to (re-)discover Kafka's works without constant recourse to the mantras of critical orthodoxy. In addition, she situates Kafka's texts within their wider cultural, historical and political contexts illustrating how they respond to the concerns of their age, and of our own.
Download or read book Franz Kafka and his Prague Contexts written by Marek Nekula and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 242 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.
Download or read book Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life written by James Hawes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka's genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire's son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today's dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague's German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique. Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths: *Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime. *Kafka was lonely. *Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write. *Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. *Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest. *Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs. *Kafka's style is mysterious and opaque. *Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers---scholars, biographers, and tourist guides---have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he'll take no prisoners in the process.
Download or read book Metamorphosis written by Franz Kafka and published by Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Kafka, the author has very nicely narrated the story of Gregou Samsa who wakes up one day to discover that he has metamorphosed into a bug. The book concerns itself with the themes of alienation and existentialism. The author has written many important stories, including The Judgement, and much of his novels Amerika, The Castle, The Hunger Artist. Many of his stories were published during his lifetime but many were not. Over the course of the 1920s and 30s Kafkas works were published and translated instantly becoming landmarks of twentieth-century literature. Ironically, the story ends on an optimistic note, as the family puts itself back together. The style of the book epitomizes Kafkas writing. Kafka very interestingly, used to present an impossible situation, such as a mans transformation into an insect, and develop the story from there with perfect realism and intense attention to detail. The Metamorphosis is an autobiographical piece of writing, and we find that parts of the story reflect Kafkas own life.
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.
Download or read book Kafka Goes to the Movies written by Hanns Zischler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Went to the movies. Wept. Matchless entertainment." So wrote Franz Kafka in one of his diaries, giving us but one hint of his little-known passion for the cinema. Until now, Kafka aficionados have been left to speculate about which films moved Kafka so powerfully and how those films might have influenced his writing. With Kafka Goes to the Movies, German actor and film director Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide the first account of Kafka's moviegoing life. Since many of Kafka's visits to the cinema occurred during bachelor trips with Max Brod, Zischler's research took him not only to Kafka's native Prague but to film archives in Munich, Milan, and Paris. Matching Kafka's cinematic references to reviews and stills from daily papers, Zischler hunted down rare films in collections all across Europe. A labor of love, then, by a true man of the cinema, Kafka Goes to the Movies brims with discoveries about the pioneering years of European film. With a wealth of illustrations, including reproductions of movie posters and other rare materials, Zischler opens a fascinating window onto movies that have been long forgotten or assumed lost. But the real highlights of the book are those about Kafka himself. Long considered one of the most enigmatic figures in literature, the Kafka that emerges in this work is strikingly human. Kafka Goes to the Movies offers an absorbing look at a witty, passionate, and indulgently curious writer, one who discovered and used the cinema as a place of enjoyment and escape, as a medium for the ambivalent encounter with modern life, and as a filter for the changing world around him.
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.”
Download or read book Kafka s Blues written by Mark Christian Thompson and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's Blues proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka's major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the "Negro" (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in Kafka's work are impossible without passage through a state of being "Negro." Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music to evolutionary theory, biblical allusion, and aesthetic primitivism—each grounded in a concept of writing that is linked to the perceived congenital musicality of the "Negro," and which is bound to his wider conception of aesthetic production. Mark Christian Thompson offers new close readings of canonical texts and undervalued letters and diary entries set in the context of the afterlife of New World slavery and in Czech and German popular culture.
Download or read book Franz Kafka in Context written by Carolin Duttlinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.
Download or read book The Drawings written by Andreas B. 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.
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 A Country Doctor Ein Landarzt written by Franz Kafka and published by BoD E-Short. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition contains the English translation and the original text in German. "A Country Doctor" (German: "Ein Landarzt") is a short story written in 1919 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title. Die Erzählung "Ein Landarzt" von Franz Kafka entstand im Jahr 1917 und wurde 1918 veröffentlicht. Im Jahre 1920 erschien – nach mehreren kriegsbedingten Verzögerungen – das Buch "Ein Landarzt" mit der Erzählung gleichen Titels und dreizehn weiteren Prosatexten im Verlag Kurt Wolff. Das Buch enthält die Widmung: "Meinem Vater". Drei Stücke hiervon waren vorab bereits in der Zweimonatsschrift "Marsyas" erschienen. Zahlreiche Prosastücke des Erzählbandes wurden durch Träume Kafkas angeregt, die er vorab in seinen Tagebüchern beschrieb.
Download or read book Franz Kafka the Eternal Son written by Peter-André Alt and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Kafka remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His novels, stories, and letters are still regarded today as the epitome of the dark, fascinating, and uncanny, a model of the modernist aesthetic. Peter-André Alt's landmark biography, Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son, recounts and explores Kafka's life and literary work throughout the cultural and political upheavals of central Europe. Alt's biography explores Franz Kafka's own view of life and writing as a unity that shaped his identity. He locates links and echoes among the author's work, life, and surroundings, situating him within the traditions of Prague's German literature, modernity, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as within its Jewish culture, arts, theater, and intellectual tradition. In this biographical tour de force, Kafka emerges as an observant flaneur and wistful loner, an anxious ascetic, an ecstatic and skeptic, a specialist in terror, and a master of irony. Alt masterfully illuminates Kafka's life not as source material but as a mirror of his literary genius. Readers begin to see Kafka's unforgettable novels and stories as shards reflecting the life of their creator.
