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  • Published: 4 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784875626
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99

Amerika




'Perhaps the most interesting writer of his generation... A strange and disconcerting genius' Edwin Muir

‘No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our times’ George Steiner

After an embarrassing sexual misadventure with a servant girl, sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman is banished to America by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in the land of opportunity, Karl’s youthful breeziness propels him into a series of bizarre escapades which threaten to ensnare him permanently. Though dredged with humour and optimism, Kafka’s first novel bears his distinctive hallmarks, as young Karl becomes mired in an ever more unreal and oppressive system.

THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION BY WILLA AND EDWIN MUIR

  • Published: 4 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784875626
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99

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.

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Praise for Amerika

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

George Steiner

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