Description

Karl Rossmann reaches New York from Europe at sixteen. He brings hope but knows little of the world. His rich uncle takes him in, then rejects him. In a vast, strange hotel, Karl starts a new life. He finds love but struggles to make sense of injustice. Though others treat him with hate, he refuses to hate them.

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel follows youth through a harsh, bewildering world. This pocket edition belongs to the Top 10+ series. Pop Simion and Erika Voiculescu translated it from German.

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to a Jewish family. He studied at a German school, then earned his law doctorate in 1906. He worked in insurance and wrote in secret at night. His friend, the poet Max Brod, urged him to publish. A story collection appeared in 1913 and found success. Kafka also kept journals and wrote many letters. He left all three of his novels unfinished and destroyed much of his work. After Kafka died in 1924, Brod gathered and published his surviving work, against Kafka’s wish that it be burned. America appeared in 1927. Kafka’s strange, anxiety-filled vision later shaped writers from French existentialists to Salinger and Saramago.