Name: Selected Stories
SKU: 56172695
Price: 30.62 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Franz Kafka
ISBN: 9780674737983

Type

Physical Book

Author

Illustrated by

Translated by

Publisher

Year

2024

Language

English

Pages

304

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

21.2x14.4x3.4 cm

ISBN13

9780674737983

Edition No.

Synopsis "Selected Stories"

A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.

Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose―terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.

Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.

Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.

Franz Kafka

(Author)

View Author's Page

(Prague, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1883 - Kierling, Austria, 1924) Bohemian writer in German language. His work, among the most influential in world literature, is a pioneer in the fusion of realistic elements with fantastic ones and focuses mainly on father-son conflicts, anxiety, existentialism, physical and psychological brutality, guilt, the philosophy of the absurd, bureaucracy, and spiritual transformations. He wrote notable novels and a large number of short stories, and also left behind extensive correspondence and autobiographical writings. His unique literary style has often been associated with the artistic philosophy of existentialism and expressionism. His personal relationships also had a significant impact on his writing. The term Kafkaesque is used in Spanish to describe bizarre situations, due to their absurdity and distressing nature.

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