Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Kafka’s letters are precious for what they reveal of a literary genius’s insights into the predicaments of the modern artist, as well as for what they tell us of Kafka’s loves, loyalties, fears, guilt, and his floundering attempts to cope with the debilitating disease that blighted half his adult life . . . Fluently and gracefully translated, helpfully annotated with care and admirable concision, [they] afford us an inside view of a writer who, perhaps more than any other novelist or poet in our century, stands at the center of our culture.”
—Robert Alter, The New York Times Book Review

“A series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling; the self is lit by fantasy and, of course, by drollery. He was a marvelous letter writer.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books