From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, his first—and funniest—novel.
Amerika tells the story of the young Karl Rossmann who, after an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.
Kafka began writing what he had entitled Der Verschollene (The Missing Person) in 1912 and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914. But it wasn’t until 1927, three years after his death, that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Amerika.
Praise for Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle
“Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka’s nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come.” --J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
“There is a great deal to applaud in Harman’s translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka’s uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English.” --Robert Alter, The New Republic
“A major and long-awaited event in English language publishing [and] a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers, who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka’s original manuscript.” --Professor Mark M. Anderson, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University
FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, his first—and funniest—novel.
Amerika tells the story of the young Karl Rossmann who, after an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.
Kafka began writing what he had entitled Der Verschollene (The Missing Person) in 1912 and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914. But it wasn’t until 1927, three years after his death, that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Amerika.
Reviews
Praise for Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle
“Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka’s nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come.” --J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
“There is a great deal to applaud in Harman’s translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka’s uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English.” --Robert Alter, The New Republic
“A major and long-awaited event in English language publishing [and] a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers, who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka’s original manuscript.” --Professor Mark M. Anderson, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University
FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
