Franz Kafka
(1883–1924) was a key twentieth-century writer; his major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
The Lost Writings
Fiction by Franz Kafka
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
With a contribution by Reiner Stach
So, you want to leave me? Well, one decision is as good as another. Where will you go? Where is away-from-me? On the moon? Not even that is far enough, and you’ll never get there. So why the fuss? Wouldn’t you rather sit down in a corner somewhere, and be quiet? Wouldn’t that be an improvement? A warm, dark corner? Aren’t you listening? You’re feeling for the door. Well, where is it?…
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Investigations of a Dog & Other Creatures
Fiction by Franz Kafka
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, bouncing balls, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the snappy dialogue between a cat and a mouse in “Little Fable” to the absurd humor of “Investigations of a Dog,” from the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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Amerika
by Franz Kafka
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Karl Rossman, “a poor boy of seventeen,” has been sent away to America by his parents for his part in a scandal, and his travels unfold revelations about himself and his dreams. This is a new world where the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a sword rather than a torch, swindlers abound, and a bridge connects Boston to New York City.
The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann’s “sleek translation does a wonderful job” and The New York Times concurred: “Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.…
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They have been translated by polyphonic, wizardly Michael Hofmann, who has made of Kafka a marvelous, often very humorous writer of eccentric English prose.—Reading in Translation
Kafka himself stays well enough afloat. Even when he fumbles, he never falls wholly flat: at his worst, he is provocative yet provisional. But at his best, he is hilarious and mordant, mired in the impossibilities that he could neither live with nor without.—Bookforum, Becca Rothfeld
These marks make visible the fourth wall that is implicit in each work Kafka left in some way unfinished, and even in those whose publication he permitted. It’s not only the characters, but Kafka himself who could find no way out. The Lost Writings helps us linger with him, in his impassable doorways.—The Baffler, Nathan Goldman
This delightful collection features dozens of untitled fragments, false starts, and unfinished work by Kafka, found and chosen by biographer Stach…Opening sentences such as “I was allowed to set foot in a strange garden” and “The city resembles the sun,” make the reader’s pulse heighten with the thrill of entering the space of great literature. This offers precisely the kind of fare Kafka enthusiasts would hope for from the legendary writer’s archives.—Publishers Weekly
Kafka is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him.—Vladimir Nabokov
I think of a Kafka story as a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable.—Michael Hofmann
Of course I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable people do.—Jorge Luis Borges
He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him.—Vladimir Nabokov
A stirring, singular work, now restored to its original beauty.—John Ashbery
What Kafka’s stories have…is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, ‘unconscious,’ which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul.—David Foster Wallace
Michael Hofmann’s magnificent new translation restores its rightful place as one of Kafka’s most delightful and most memorable works.—Charles Simic
