This small collection of 74 pieces is a treasure trove of brilliant Kafka stories only now in English.
"Unearthed by the master Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, this collection comes as a prize and a joy. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long. Lost to English-language readers until now, all are marvels: even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. "Wonderful," Hofmann remarked, as he was translating. "It's full of the love of narration, surprises, and the sweetness and purity of invention. It's amazing how inexhaustible Kafka is. We think we 'know' him and have him down. He pops up somewhere else, as something different. It's my (sober) assessment that nothing will have changed our view of Kafka more than this book in fifty years"--
“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.”
A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann
