Conversations With Kafka
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What does it mean to sit across from one of literature's greatest enigmas and simply talk? Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka answers that question with remarkable intimacy, chronicling a series of personal exchanges between the young Janouch and Franz Kafka during the early 1920s in Prague. As a teenager whose father worked alongside Kafka at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, Janouch gained extraordinary access to the reclusive author, recording Kafka's candid reflections on literature, life, suffering, modernity, and his own tortured creative process. The result is an irreplaceable primary document that illuminates the private mind of a writer who published little in his lifetime yet reshaped the entire trajectory of Western literature. Translated from the German by Goronwy Rees and introduced by Hugh Haughton, this edition presents Janouch's memoir with scholarly care, situating it within the broader context of Kafka's biography and literary legacy. The conversations reveal a man at once self-deprecating and visionary, acutely aware of the alienation and absurdity that would come to define the very adjective bearing his name. Janouch's portrait is not hagiography — it is something rarer and more valuable: a human record of genius in conversation with the ordinary world. For anyone drawn to the labyrinthine corridors of Kafka's imagination, this volume raises a disquieting question — how much of what Kafka said in private was itself a kind of parable?
Author: Gustav Janouch
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What does it mean to sit across from one of literature's greatest enigmas and simply talk? Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka answers that question with remarkable intimacy, chronicling a series of personal exchanges between the young Janouch and Franz Kafka during the early 1920s in Prague. As a teenager whose father worked alongside Kafka at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, Janouch gained extraordinary access to the reclusive author, recording Kafka's candid reflections on literature, life, suffering, modernity, and his own tortured creative process. The result is an irreplaceable primary document that illuminates the private mind of a writer who published little in his lifetime yet reshaped the entire trajectory of Western literature. Translated from the German by Goronwy Rees and introduced by Hugh Haughton, this edition presents Janouch's memoir with scholarly care, situating it within the broader context of Kafka's biography and literary legacy. The conversations reveal a man at once self-deprecating and visionary, acutely aware of the alienation and absurdity that would come to define the very adjective bearing his name. Janouch's portrait is not hagiography — it is something rarer and more valuable: a human record of genius in conversation with the ordinary world. For anyone drawn to the labyrinthine corridors of Kafka's imagination, this volume raises a disquieting question — how much of what Kafka said in private was itself a kind of parable?