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'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias Can ...
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; The Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial, and The Castle.
'It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing' Albert Camus
'Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man' W. H. Auden
'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias Canetti
The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers are now published for the first time in a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer ...
'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' Vladimir Nabokov
'Perhaps the most interesting writer of his generation-A strange and disconcerting genius' Edwin Muir