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2024/03/19 - 11:14

Kafka, by Nicholas Murray

9. January 2021  

Price:$19.80

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The story is well known: the frail, anxiety-ridden young man in Prague who suffers under an overbearing, uncouth father. Every day he trudges off to his boring job at an insurance company. He is drawn to women yet agonizes about every relationship. At night, he writes away but wins scant recognition. He contracts tuberculosis, and his last, truly miserable years are spent in and out of sanatoriums. His final wish is that all his manuscripts be burned, but his best friend violates the request. Within a few years of his death in 1924, Franz Kafka's writings about characters ensnared by the world around them for no apparent reason are recognized as brilliant manifestations of literary modernism. Murray (Bruce Chatwin, etc.) is an experienced biographer and effectively relates Kafka's brief life, trying valiantly to depict a more normal Kafka, a man who lived in society with good friends, enjoyed sex, had wide-ranging intellectual interests and became enamored of Judaism. In Murray's account, Kafka's employer valued him highly, and under the imprint of no less a figure than Kurt Wolff, he experienced some literary success. Despite Murray's best efforts to contain Kafka's idiosyncrasies, though, the writer remains the tormented soul who created out of his personal anxieties and agonies some of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century.
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Product Description:
The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age

Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.

Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books—stories suffused with guilt and frustration—derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.

Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

Nicholas Murray is the author of many books, including biographies of Bruce Chatwin, Matthew Arnold, and Aldous Huxley, a book of poetry, and two novels.

Niels Bokhove & Marijke van Dorst, Einmal ein grosser Zeichner [Franz Kafka pictorial artist]

9. January 2021  

A collection of all hitherto known drawings of the author Franz Kafka, edited by Niels Bokhove and Marijke van Dorst.
Franz Kafka is famous as a writer, but his original wish to become a draughtsman is almost unknown. This edition brings together the fourty drawings ever here and there published. Each drawing is accompanied with one or more texts (in German), belonging to or matching with it . The volume concludes with an afterword (in Dutch) and copious notes to the drawings.
A publication on occasion of the decennial jubilee of the Dutch Franz Kafka Circle.
Edition in large size (A4), 99 pp. Restricted printing.
Salon Saffier, publisher.
Orders to: Marijke van Dorst, or:
Nachtegaalstraat 55 II, NL-3581 AD Utrecht. Tel./fax +31 30 670 10 20.
ISBN 90-807595-1-1. - Price € 18,50 (excl. dispatch costs (package and postage) Europe priority € 5,25, standard € 4,00; outside Europe priority € 10,00, standard € 6,50).
Order by remittance of total amount to M. van Dorst/Salon Saffier, Postbank 3258980 (or by sending an International Money Order), mentioning 'Kafka drawings'. N.B. all bank charges etc. for client's account (OUR)! (IBAN NL 30 - PSTB 0003 2598980. And one HAS to mention "M. van Dorst", not only "Salon Saffier", because this last is not linked to the IBAN number in the bank's system)

Letter to the Father, Greek Translation by Alexander Kypriotis

9. January 2021

Alexandros Kypriotis

Franz Kafka: Letter to the Father

First translation into Greek from the original manuscripts.

Στην "Επιστολή προς τον πατέρα" ο Φραντς Κάφκα παρουσιάζεται περισσότερο από ποτέ "... σαν γυμνός ανάμεσα σε ντυμένους", όπως τον χαρακτήρισε η πρώτη μεταφράστριά του στα Τσεχικά, και αγαπημένη του, Μίλενα Γέσενσκα...

Philipp Lundberg: Essential Kafka

9. January 2021

Phillip Lundberg

Essential Kafka: Rendezvous with 'otherness'. Five Stories by Franz Kafka

This translation of Kafka has a dual purpose, for starters it intends to provide English readers with a better translation: that Kafka's prose should find a more fitting analogy in 'modern (American) English' whereby it should come to life to a greater degree, and that his underlying philosophy—and I say philosophy in the greater sense—thus, should be grasped more readily. The second purpose is to explore issues regarding translation per se: what is the proper role of the translator? and why are so many translations done so poorly? The five stories included in this book have been carefully selected to present Kafka's literary genius in its historical genesis: from Metamorphosis (1915), Report to the Academy (1917), In the Penal Colony (1919), The Burrow (1923/24) - to Kafka's "last word" Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk which was written shortly before Kafka's death in 1924.

This book also contains a short postscript on the art of translation that argues against the current modus operandi of translation theory, indeed, it goes so far as to quote from Kafka's diaries as well as from Schliermacher and early Roman translators on the responsibility of the translator to capture the spirit of the work in an imaginative manner. Kafka's prose does not defy understanding, rather it allows man to break through the barrier of 'otherness' by its honest presentation of the same. Buy here!

François Taillandier legge Il Processo di Kafka

9. January 2021

François Taillandier legge Il processo di Franz Kafka

Ed. Metauro, Piccola Biblioteca del Romanzo, pp. 39, 7.50 euro

Lo strano fascino di questo romanzo sta proprio nel suggerire tutti i livelli di senso possibili senza lasciarsi ridurre ad alcuno. Noi percepiamo in tutta evidenza il suo rapporto con la storia del XX secolo, con l'interrogazione metafisica ed esistenziale, coi tormenti segreti della psiche: ci rimanda ad essi, ma rimane nell'ombra. Così come non spiega il mondo che mi circonda, Il processo non si lascia spiegare da esso.

François Taillandier è nato a Clermont-Ferrand nel 1955. Ulteriori informazioni sull'autore in Wikipedia.


Revision: 2024/03/19 - 11:14 - © Mauro Nervi




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