Kafka : the decisive years / Reiner Stach ; translated from the German by Shelley Frisch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stach, Reiner, author.

Contributor:

Frisch, Shelley Laura, translator.

Standardized Title:

Kafka, die Jahre der Entscheidungen. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, Austrian--20th century--Biography.

Authors, Austrian.

Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924.

Kafka, Franz.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (624 p.) : 37 halftones.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings-- The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.

Contents:

Prologue: The black star

1. At home with the Kafkas

2. Bachelors, young and old

3. Actors, Zionists, wild people

4. Literature and loneliness : Leipzig and Weimar

5. Last stop Jungborn

6. A young lady from Berlin

7. The ecstasy of beginning : "The Judgment" and "The Stoker"

8. A near defenestration

9. The girl, the lady, and the woman

10. Love and a longing for letters

11. Exultant weeks, little intrigues

12. The Bauer family

13. America and back : The Man Who Disappeared

14. The lives of metaphors : "The Metamorphosis"

15. The fear of going mad

16. Balkan war : the massacre next door

17. 1913

18. The Man Who Disappeared : perfection and disintegration

19. Invention and exaggeration

20. Sexual trepidation and surrender

21. The working world : high tech and the ghosts of bureaucracy

22. The \proposal

23. Literature, nothing but literature

24. Three congresses in Vienna

25. Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva

26. Grete Bloch : the messenger arrives

27. An all-time low

28. Kafka and Musil

29. Matrimonial plans and asceticism

30. Tribunal in Berlin

31. The Great War

32. Self-inflicted justice : The Trial and "In the Penal Colony"

33. The Return of the East

34. The grand disruption

35. No-man's-land.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691147413

0691147418

OCLC:

1255226622