A lifelong friend and literary executor to Franz Kafka, Max Brod was a gifted author, composer, and journalist in his own right. Rather than follow Kafka's instructions to burn his unpublished works, Brod instead conscientiously published them, securing their enduring place in literature. His own prolific output, while significant, is often overshadowed by his crucial role in safeguarding the legacy of one of the 20th century's most important writers.
The first ever translation of Max Brod’s novel (originally published in German in Berlin, 1911) which portrays the prosperous and settled world of assimilated Prague Jewry before the First World War – the world not only of Max Brod but also of his life-long friend, the writer Franz Kafka.Although now overshadowed by Kafka’s success, Brod was an accomplished and prolific author in his own right. This novel is set in the spa town of Teplitz (Teplice) and is a cameo of he lives of prosperous Jewish families before the First World War. It draws a compelling and poignant picture of the normal everyday lives of its characters, so touchingly unaware of the traumas to come in the following decades when their communities would be shattered beyond repair.
The diaries offer an intimate glimpse into Franz Kafka's thoughts and experiences from 1910 to 1913, revealing his creative process and personal struggles. This collection serves as a valuable resource for fans, providing deeper insights into the mind of one of the 20th century's most influential writers.
First published in 1935, The Trial is a classic story of totalitarianism, sadism, and hysteria. With a labyrinth of meanings, author Franz Kafka explores the dark lives of killers.
Concerns the relationship between the great Danish astronomer and the younger,
intellectually superior Johannes Kepler. This book talks of a conflict that
becomes an emblem of the struggle between a weakened tradition and a self-
conscious modernity. It conveys the intimate, emotional reality of a
seventeenth-century political conflict.
Max Brod, a successful novelist, was a boyhood companion of Kafka's and remained closely tied to him until Kafka's death in 1924. He was undoubtedly the one man whom Kafka trusted more than any other, and it is to Brod, as his literary executor and editor, that we are indebted for rescuing and bringing to light Kafka's work. Out of a lifelong devoted friendship, Brod drew this account of Kafka's youth, family and friends, his struggle to recognize himself as a writer, his sickness, and his last days. Franz Kafka gives us not only a more vivid and lifelike picture of Kafka than that painted by any of his contemporaries, but also a fascinating portrayal of the complicated interaction between two writers of different temperaments but similar backgrounds who together helped shape the future of twentieth-century literature.
To look at the modern world is, to some extent, to look at it through Franz Kafka's eyes. For the writers and readers who have followed him, Kafka is the preeminent writer and consciousness of the twentieth century. In The Nightmare of Reason, Ernst Pawel has captured what is essential in Kafka and has described, evenly and dispassionately, the interplay of work and life. Kafka is a modern myth. Not only his work, but the distortions in previous biographies—particularly the first, written by Kafka's great friend Max Brod—make this so. Pawel's achievement is to place Kafka in his time and to portray a man whose life was far more moving than the myths that have arisen around it. The Nightmare of Reason, as well as chronicling the life of the writer, is also a brilliant evocation of a milieu. The Prague of affluent Germanized Jewry, the intellectual ferment of Central Europe before the First World War, and brilliant, doomed Austria-Hungary itself and its collapse are woven into Pawel's account. The Nightmare of Reason is informed by psychological insights but does not depend on them. Indeed, Pawel is concerned to present not the Kafka of legend—that helpless, neurasthenic clerk—but rather a man who moved about in the world, who was a most reluctant but surprisingly effective business executive, and who was in some ways as typical of his age and class as, in others, he transcended them. Pawel has taken nothing at face value, and his readings of such problematic issues as Kafka's Judaism, his relations with his parents, the stormy engagement to Felice Bauer, and his affair with Milena Jesenká are immensely revealing and persuasive.
