The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (English and German Edition) - Hardcover

Karl Kraus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374182213 ISBN 13: 9780374182212

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

Synopsis

A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic-a personal and intellectual awakening

A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.

In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose "calm, passionate critical authority" has been praised in The New York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.

While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today's cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus's work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Praise for author Jonathan Franzen:

"A literary genius for our time." ―Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

"Franzen is arguably America's greatest living novelist . . . He writes continually about writing and reading, luxuriating in language and sticking up for literature for literature's sake." ―Paul Clements, The Daily Telegraph

"Never less than superbly intelligent."

―Richard Davenport-Hines, The Spectator

"Little contends with Franzen's prose. He writes behemoth sentences, graceful, technical mini-wonders that read as easily as his most colloquial quips . . . Franzen never feels more lucid than when assessing―or more often championing―texts that have taken him by the lapels." ―Sean Hoen, Paste

"Not only is Jonathan Franzen the most important novelist of our time, but . . . he is also an incredibly wise and clear-headed thinker who can humbly analyze and explain some of the most complex situations through the most poignant, insightful, and precise observations." ―Randy Rosenthal, The Coffin Factory

About the Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (Freedom, The Corrections, Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City), two collections of essays (Farther Away and How to Be Alone), and a personal history (The Discomfort Zone), and the translator of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, all published by FSG. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936) was an Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and journalist. From 1899 until his death, he published the literary and political review Die Fackel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0374182213
• ISBN 13: 9780374182212
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318
• Editor: Jonathan Franzen