Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures - Softcover

Kafka, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811226891 ISBN 13: 9780811226899

Publisher: New Directions, 2017

Synopsis

A masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most fantastical and visionary short fiction

Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in “Little Fable” to the absurd humor of “Investigations of a Dog,” from the elaborate waking nightmare of “Building the Great Wall of China” to the creeping unease of “The Burrow,” where a nameless creature’s labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

About this title

About the Author

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

The poet Michael Hofmann has won numerous prizes for his German translations.

Review

“This New Directions release of Investigations of a Dog provides an opportunity to reconsider many of Kafka’s greatest stories in a new book, with beautiful cover design, and to reexamine how a brilliant mind performed under spiritually backbreaking circumstances.”
- Los Angeles Review of Books

“Hofmann’s translation is invaluable―it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”
- New Republic

“Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended. He has cut through literary pretension to seek out the heart of Kafka’s work―the very ‘particles’ of his writing, as they have been called. His translation shows Kafka as a modern writer whose work was beyond that of anything written at that time. Mr. Hofmann, in his many excellent translations from the German, always makes brave choices.”
- Lee Rourke, The Guardian

“Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“Hofmann and Kafka...provide one with rich intellectual companionship.”
- Franz Kafka, The Times Literary Supplement

“Kafka spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.”
- John Updike

“Of course I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable people do.”
- Jorge Luis Borges

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811226891
• ISBN 13: 9780811226899
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 244