He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka - Paperback

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He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka
  • He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka
He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka - Paperback

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka - Paperback

by Franz Kafka
$19.00
$19.00

Book Overview

by Franz Kafka (Author), Joshua Cohen (Editor)

A new selection of Franz Kafka's shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.

"Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who's standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point." --Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka's preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style.

Cohen's selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe's only reliable narrator--God.

Author Biography

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of the best-known writers in the German language. He is especially famous for The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, as well as his many shorter works. He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

Joshua Cohen is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Book of Numbers and Moving Kings; the short-story collection Four New Messages; and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. In 2017 Cohen was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
Number of Pages: 320
Dimensions: 0.87 x 7.48 x 4.96 IN
Publication Date: February 22, 2022
ISBN9780374538941
Author Franz Kafka
PublisherPicador USA
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedFebruary 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages320
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Fiction Literary

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About Franz Kafka

Stanley Corngold is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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