Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds

Author(s): Reiner Stach

Literature

In the course of compiling his highly acclaimed three-volume biography of Kafka, while foraying to libraries and archives from Prague to Israel, Reiner Stach made one astounding discovery after another: unexpected photographs, inconsistencies in handwritten texts, excerpts from letters, and testimonies from Kafka's contemporaries that shed surprising light on his personality and his writing. Is that Kafka? presents the crystal granules of the real Kafka: he couldn't lie, but he tried to cheat on his high-school exams; bitten by the fitness fad, he avidly followed the regime of a Danish exercise guru; he drew beautifully; he loved beer; he read biographies voraciously; he made the most beautiful presents, especially for children; odd things made him cry or made him furious; he adored slapstick. Every discovery by Stach turns on its head the stereotypical version of the tortured neurotic-and as each one chips away at the monolithic dark Kafka, the keynote, of all things, becomes laughter. For Is that Kafka? Stach has assembled 99 of his most exciting discoveries, culling the choicest, most entertaining bits, and adding his knowledge-able commentaries. Illustrated with dozens of previously unknown images, this volume is a singular literary pleasure.

Franz Kafka was an exceptional writer, not just in quality but in his qualities. He was also an exception to much of what has been thought of him since, or, rather, both as a writer and a person, he is compounded from exceptions, both to his literary and social milieu and to his own psychology. Not only that, he was an exception to those exceptions. Reiner Stach has written an exhaustive three-volume biography of Kafka, and, while doing so, he has collected these 99 snippets which, published together, display the broader Kafka behind the cliché and are a corrective to conceptions of ‘the Kafkaesque’ which often distort approaches to his works. Kafka never lied but he did cheat in an exam, he liked to drink beer, he followed a fitness regime, he made presents for children, he devised, with his friend Max Brod, a series of on-the-cheap travel guides, he loved slapstick and he liked to be called Frank. Stach also provides a couple of plausible Kafka sightings in contemporary crowd photographs. Is that Kafka? Quite possibly, yes.


{THOMAS}


Product Information

"A Kafka bag full of surprises." -- Der Tagesspiegel "This collection, original and entertaining, is a masterful, exciting mix of diligent research and sophisticated literary gossip." -- Neues Deutschland

Reiner Stach, born in 1951 in Saxony, is the author of the definitive biography of Kafka. The first two volumes, published by Princeton University Press, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly ("superb"), Library Journal ("a monumental accomplishment"), Kirkus ("essential"), and Booklist ("masterful"). "I can't say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stach's book," Michael Dirda exclaimed in The Washington Post. "Every page feels excited, dynamic, utterly alive." In 2010 Kurt Beals was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award for Anja Utler's engulf-enkindle, and in 2012 he won the first ever German Book Office Translation Prize. His translation of Regina Ullmann's The Country Road was published by New Directions in 2015.

General Fields

  • : 9780811221238
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : 0.47
  • : March 2016
  • : 203mm X 127mm
  • : United States
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Reiner Stach
  • : Hardback
  • : 833.912
  • : 352
  • : BGLA