Kafka: The Decisive Years, Volume 2

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Princeton University Press, Jun 9, 2013 - Biography & Autobiography - 581 pages

This is 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.



Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
The Black Star
16
At Home with the Kafkas
21
Bachelors Young and Old
42
Actors Zionists Wild People
54
Leipzig and Weimar
71
Last Stop Jungborn
86
A Young Lady from Berlin
94
The Proposal
297
Literature Nothing but Literature
324
Three Congresses in Vienna
350
Trieste Venice Verona Riva
368
The Messenger Arrives
379
An AllTime Low
390
Kafka and Musil
401
Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism
413

The Judgment and The Stoker
108
A Near Defenestration
119
The Girl the Lady and the Woman
134
Love and a Longing for Letters
145
Exultant Weeks Little Intrigues
159
The Bauer Family
169
The Man Who Disappeared
175
The Metamorphosis
192
The Fear of Going Mad
206
The Massacre Next Door
226
Perfection and Disintegration
242
Invention and Exaggeration
253
Sexual Trepidation and Surrender
266
High Tech and the Ghosts
281
Tribunal in Berlin
433
The Great War
444
The Trial and In the Penal Colony
464
The Return of the East
484
The Grand Disruption
493
NoMansLand
508
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
517
TRANSLATORS NOTE
519
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
521
NOTES
523
BIBLIOGRAPHY
551
PHOTO CREDITS
563
INDEX
565
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on this three-volume biography. The third volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton), covering Kafka's final years, is also available. The first volume, covering Kafka's childhood and youth, is forthcoming.

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