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The Lost Writings

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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."

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 6, 2020
      This delightful collection features dozens of untitled fragments, false starts, and unfinished work by Kafka, found and chosen by biographer Stach. In mostly untitled pieces, ranging from a few lines to a couple of pages, readers will find aphorisms (“to a real angler no fish is ever really lost”), meditations on the myth of Prometheus and the eighth wonder of the world, fables about a loaf of bread that can’t be cut, a description of a shop without a front door, a mysterious chess game, an egg containing a misbegotten bird, and short works that anticipate some of Kafka’s masterpieces, including The Metamorphosis. Also on view are the kind of bureaucratic fever dreams associated with Kafka, along with mordant statements on mortality (“You are forever speaking of death, and not dying”). Opening sentences such as “I was allowed to set foot in a strange garden” and “The city resembles the sun,” make the reader’s pulse heighten with the thrill of entering the space of great literature. This offers precisely the kind of fare Kafka enthusiasts would hope for from the legendary writer’s archives.

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  • English

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