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A culturally-influential and celebrated author, Kafka is generally considered to be one of the most accomplished writers of the 20th century. In this boxed set are collected together three of his major works, including the maginificent 'Metamorphosis and Other Stories'.

Kafka's story about a man seeking acceptance and access to the mysterious castle is among the central works of modern literature. This translation follows the German critical text and includes a detailed introduction and notes to this famously enigmatic novel.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “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.”

Kafka is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature; a wide international readership and the subject of a long and continuing critical debate. William Dodd concentrates on the two major novels, The Trial and The Castle, providing in-depth examination of these works. This collection of sixteen essays covers the full spectrum of modern perspectives, from humanism to feminist responses and cultural analysis that reflects both German and Anglo-Saxon approaches. The text contains a general introduction, including a bibliographical outline and an overview of the critical debate, contextualising the modern contributions. There is also a section concerned with the early responses to Kafka's work, many published for the first time in English, and a detailed glossary of critical terms.

In Stanley Corngold’s view, the themes and strategies of Kafka’s fiction are generated by a tension between his concern for writing and his growing sense of its arbitrary character. Analyzing Kafka’s work in light of "the necessity of form," which is also a merely formal necessity, Corngold uncovers the fundamental paradox of Kafka’s art and life. The first section of the book shows how Kafka’s rhetoric may be understood as the daring project of a man compelled to live his life as literature. In the central part of the book, Corngold reflects on the place of Kafka within the modern tradition, discussing such influential precursors of Cervantes, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, whose works display a comparable narrative disruption. Kafka’s distinctive narrative strategies, Corngold points out, demand interpretation at the same time they resist it. Critics of Kafka, he says, must be aware that their approaches are guided by the principles that Kafka’s fiction identifies, dramatizes, and rejects.

Kafka's final, unfinished novel The Castle remains one of the most celebrated yet most stubbornly uninterpretable masterpieces of modernist fiction. Consequently it has been a lightning rod for theories and methods of literary criticism. In this chronological study of its fate at the hands of academic and non-academic critics, S. D. Dowden lays emphasis on the acts of critical imagination that have shaped our image and understanding of Kafka and his novel. He explores the historical and cultural contingencies of criticism: from the Weimar Era of Max Brod and Walter Benjamin to Lionel Trilling's Cold War to the postmodern moment of multiculturalism and its turn to "cultural studies." Dowden shows how and why The Castle became a contested site in the imaginative life of each succeeding generation of criticism. In addition, he accounts for those moments at which Kafka's novel escapes, or at least attempts to escape, the gravitational pull of historically anchored understanding. Forthright in its prose, Dowden's is a book essential for anyone, casual reader or professional critic, who hopes to grasp the peculiar difficulties and challenges of Kafka's prose in general and of The Castle in particular.

A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.