A Spectator Best Book of the Year
âItâs an extremely handsome, well-designed book, and you couldnât ask for a better introduction to Kafka...If youâve never read Kafka before or if you already love him, youâll still want Harmanâs Selected Stories.â
âMichael Dirda, The Washington Post
A superb new translation of Kafkaâs classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.
Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafkaâs unique German proseâterse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.
Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafkaâs artistic development. Some, like âThe Judgment,â âIn the Penal Colony,â âA Hunger Artist,â and âThe Transformationâ (usually, though misleadingly, translated as âThe Metamorphosisâ), represent the pinnacle of Kafkaâs achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.
Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafkaâs diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.