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  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241372586
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

Amerika




A lyrical translation of Kafka's first novel - a menacing allegory of modern life

Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slowly makes his way into the interior of the great continent.

Kafka's first novel (begun in 1911 and never finished) is infused with a quite un-Kafkaesque blitheness and sunniness, brought to life in this lyrical translation that returns to the original manuscript of the book.

  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241372586
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Franz Kafka

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; 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.

Also by Franz Kafka

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Praise for Amerika

No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our times

George Steienr

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

It was Kafka who made me understand that one can write differently

Gabriel García Márquez