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Cover of Amerika by Franz Kafka

Amerika

  • 299 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 1927
  • 94 editions

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1 About this book

"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912.

Kafka began writing the novel that fall and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914, but it wasn't until 1927, three years after his death, that Amerika - the title that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod gave his edited version of the unfinished manuscript - was published in Germany by Kurt Wolff Verlag.

An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published in Great Britain in 1932 and in the United States in 1946."

Good for readers who want: a classic and humor.

  • Immigrants in fiction
  • Classics
  • Immigrants
  • Humor
  • Social conditions
  • Young men
  • Austrian fiction
  • Germanic literature

2 About Franz Kafka

1883–1924

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-language Jewish writer from Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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