Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds

Author(s): Reiner Stach

Literature | Read our reviews! | New Directions

In the course of compiling his highly acclaimed, three-volume life of Kafka, Reiner Stach made one astounding discovery after another: original writings, unexpected photographs, inconsistencies in handwritten texts, surprising excerpts from letters, and testimonies from Kafka's contemporaries that shed surprising light on his personality and his writing. Is that Kafka? presents tasty morsels all about the real Kafka: he couldn't lie, but he cheated 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 to children; odd things made him cry or made him furious; he adored slapstick. Every discovery by Stach chips away at the stereotypical version of Kafka as the dark, sexless, tortured neurotic-and laughter, of all things, becomes the keynote.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
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}

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"A playful new book from Reiner Stach, one that pulls together ninety nine facts and observations from the Czech author's life, all with the purpose of clearing the brush of falsehoods about the man that linger in the public imagination." -- Jonathon Sturgeon - Flavorwire " Moves beyond the myths and cliches." -- Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

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

  • : 9780811225168
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • : 0.34
  • : December 2016
  • : 203mm X 127mm
  • : United States
  • : May 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Reiner Stach
  • : Paperback
  • : en
  • : 833.912
  • : 352