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FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including ""The Metamorphosis,"" ""The Judgment,"" and ""The Stoker."" He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes. MARK HARMAN holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught German and Irish literature at Oberlin and Dartmouth. In addition to writing scholarly essays on Kafka and other modern authors, he has edited and co-translated Robert Walser Rediscovered- Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses and has translated Soul of the Age- Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962. He teaches literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kafka's great allegory (originally published, posthumously, in 1926) of a supposed surveyor adrift in a castle, which may be no more than a collection of random buildings, memorably expresses his distinctive vision of a formless and secretive world that frustrates our efforts to comprehend it. This compulsively readable new translation, based on a text restored from the author's original manuscript, labors to replace the standard English version (by Willa and Edwin Muir) that had tone[d] down Kafka's ominousness and normalized his deliberately eccentric syntax and punctuation. In either translation, The Castle is a major modern symbolist work, and it's good to have it in print once again. (Kirkus Reviews)
