Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

By Franz Kafka

Book Overview

Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades' worth of Franz Kafka's letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924. Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, they include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805209492
• ISBN13: 9780805209495
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The letter as integral part of the life- work

Kafka was one of the world's great letter- writers. His letters like his parables, his meditations, his fragments, his journals must be seen not as incidental and additional work but as an inherent part, a constituent center of his work. As a letter - writer Kafka has few equals. His metaphoric and poetic brilliance shine through time and time again. This collection may not have the focus of the letters written to a single person, as those to Milena and Felice Bauer but they also contain the line- by- line brilliance of mankind's greatest voice of anxiety and fear.