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  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141195636
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $24.99

Kafka's Other Trial




A compelling examination of Kafka's life and a rare insight into his art, new to Penguin Modern Classics

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancée, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile.

In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141195636
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Elias Canetti

ELIAS CANETTI (1905-1994) spent much of his working life in Britain during and after the war. He became a British citizen in 1952 but wrote in German, the language of his childhood and youth spent in Vienna, Zurich and Frankfurt. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981.

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Praise for Kafka's Other Trial

Perhaps the most revealing essay on Kafka ever published. At last Kafka is matched in thought and prose

Times Literary Supplement
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