Kafka biography book

An Economist Best Book of

&#;A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.&#; Marina Warner

&#;A rich account of what modern readers have made of Kafka&#; Observer

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential, and enigmatic, writers of the twentieth century. His books, with their mysterious courts and monstrous insects, have had an influential reach across literature, music, art and film. But who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?

Karolina Watroba tells Kafka&#;s story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka&#;s birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself.

Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka&#;s life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka&#;s life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

Bohemian writer (–)

"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Kafka (disambiguation).

Franz Kafka (3 July &#;– 3 June ) was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis () and the novels The Trial () and The Castle (). The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs. Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. Few of his works were published during his lifetime; the story collections Contemplation () and A Country Doctor (), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in of tuberculosis, at the age of

Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work du

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.

&#;[This] biography is the primary source of our knowledge of Kafka&#;s personal life and character, and is invaluable to anyone at all interested in the mind of the Czech genius.&#;&#;Alfred Kazin, New York Herald Tribune

In many ways, Franz Kafka was as anonymous and enigmatic as the heroes of his novels. Perhaps no biography can entirely clarify the enigma; but this one helps shed light on a very complicated man.

Max Brod, a successful novelist, was a boyhood companion of Kafka&#;s and remained closely tied to him until Kafka&#;s death in He was undoubtedly the one man whom Kafka trusted more than any other, and it is to Brod, as his literary executor and editor, that we are indebted for rescuing and bringing to light Kafka&#;s work. Out of a lifelong devoted friendship, Brod drew this account of Kafka&#;s youth, family and friends, his struggle to recognize himself as a writer, his sickness, and his last days.

Franz Kafka gives us not only a more vivid and lifelike picture of Kafka than that painted by any of his contemporaries, but also a fascinating portrayal of the complicated interaction between two writers of different temperaments but similar backgrounds who together helped shape the future of twentieth-century literature.