Konundrum

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By Franz Kafka & Peter Wortsman &

Publisher Description

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers.

Contents:

   • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning
   • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt
   • Reflections
   • Concerning Parables
   • Children on the Country Road
   • The Spinning Top
   • The Street-Side Window
   • At Night
   • Unhappiness
   • Clothes Make the Man
   • On the Inability to Write
   • From Somewhere in the Middle
   • I Can Also Laugh
   • The Need to Be Alone
   • So I Sat at My Stately Desk
   • A Writer's Quandary
   • Give it Up!
   • Eleven Sons
   • Paris Outing
   • The Bridge
   • The Trees
   • The Truth About Sancho Pansa
   • The Silence of the Sirens
   • Prometheus
   • Poseidon
   • The Municipal Coat of Arms
   • A Message from the Emperor
   • The Next Village Over
   • First Sorrow
   • The Hunger Artist
   • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice
   • Investigations of a Dog
   • A Report to an Academy
   • A Hybrid
   • Transformed
   • In the Penal Colony
   • From The Burrow
   • Selected Aphorisms
   • Selected Last Conversation Shreds
   • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword)
   • The Back of Words (A Post Script)

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About Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a German-language author from Prague who wrote novels and short stories. Many of his works (such as The Trial and The Castle) involve surreal encounters with mysterious bureaucracies. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Peter Wortsman was a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow in 1974, and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He received the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award, the 2008 Gertje Potash-Suhr Prosapreis of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, and the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year in the Solas Awards Competition. He is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales (1991), the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000), and Burning Words (2006), and the travelogue/memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, from Travelers' Tales/Solas House. Wortsman's numerous translations from the German include Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil, Peter Schelmiel, The Man Who Sold His Shadow by Adelbert von Chamisso, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist and most recently, Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology he assembled, from Penguin Classics. He works as a medical and travel journalist.