Posts

Culture | Franz Kafka Nervous brilliance

Image
  Culture | Franz Kafka Nervous brilliance A definitive biography of a rare writer Save Share Jul 27th 2013 | 4 min read Kafka: The Years of Insight. By Reiner Stach. Princeton University Press; 682 pages; $35 and £24.95. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk IN 1915 a short story called “The Metamorphosis” (“ Die Verwandlung ”) was published in a small German magazine. It told the story of Gregor Samsa, a salesman who wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into an enormous bug. The author, Franz Kafka, was a middle-ranking civil servant working in Prague. He would die less than ten years later, a little-known author of three novels and several shorter works. But “The Metamorphosis”—perhaps 50 pages long—would go on to inspire countless stage adaptations and doctoral theses and scores of subsequent writers. The story, along with the novels “The Trial” and “The Castle”, ensured Kafka’s place as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. “Kafka: The Years of Insig...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kafka: The Early Years

Kafka: The Early Years. By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press; 564 pages; $35. POOR Franz Kafka. His lifetime being misunderstood by his family has been followed by an even longer literary afterlife being misunderstood by the world. According to a new biography by Reiner Stach, Kafka was not the neurotic, world-removed writer of, say, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1960s story, “A Friend of Kafka”, in which a friend says Kafka’s inhibitions “impeded him in everything”. Nor was he scarred solely by a difficult relationship with his overbearing father, an idea that Alan Bennett’s play “Kafka’s Dick” toyed with in the 1980s. In “Kafka: The Early Years”, the last instalment of a mighty, three-volume biography, Mr Stach pursues close description of Kafka’s life and times rather than the “critical biography” approach combining biography and textual interpretation. What Mr Stach uncovers in this volume—written last because of a long struggle over access to docume...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Grow Old

Poems How to Grow Old By  June 1, 2026 Save this story Don’t fret about the champagne-glass neck. Drink champagne. Inner-arm flesh, crepe bat wings. Train for night flights. Expect body hair to thin, disappear, Alpinize. Trash tweezers, shavers. In the bath, discover a warm atoll of flesh on the belly. Cup gently in your hands like raw tortilla dough. Admire its satin finish. Give thanks. One day you will wake astonished as Gregor Samsa and find you have transmogrified into a volcano. Think Parícutin, Popo, Ixta, Orizaba. Give yourself a cool new name, preferably with an “x” or “z” or “tl”: Xandra Xiznerox Zandra Zixneroz XXandra ZZizneroz Xztl Zxtl. Spew smoke. Spew cinder. On occasion, totally appropriate to toss rocks. Pumice is popular. Work on looking like Coatlicue. Practice divining with an obsidian mirror. Peer with sincerity daily. It will tell you what you dread to hear. Get used to it. Published in the print edition of the June 8, 2026 , issue. Sandra Cisneros received ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Gift

Image
The Gift By  May 16, 2011 Save this story Brodsky experienced all the struggles of his generation on his own hide, as the Russians say. His exile was no exception. Photographed, in 1980, by Irving Penn. Photograph from © 1980 Condé Nast Publications, Inc. In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend. This was not cool. Bobyshev and Brodsky were close friends. They often appeared, in alphabetical order, at public readings around Leningrad. Bobyshev was twenty-seven and recently separated from his wife; Brodsky was twenty-three and intermittently employed. Along with two other promising young poets, they’d been dubbed “the magical chorus” by their friend and mentor Anna Akhmatova, who believed that they represented a rejuvenation of the Russian poetic tradition after the years of darkness under Stalin. When Akhmatova was asked which of the young poets she mo...
Post a Comment
Read more