In 2006, German author and editor Reiner Stach told an American reporter there was no definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Actually, there is. And he’s written it. My favorite book of 2013 is actually ...

In his biography of Franz Kafka, Max Brod declared that his friend never wrote a “single word” that was not “infused with a special magic charm.” Ever since the posthumous publication of Kafka’s work, ...

In 2006, German author and editor Reiner Stach told an American reporter there was no definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Actually, there is. And he's written it.

The best thing a biographer of Franz Kafka can do is bring the famed author back to earth. Not as regards his reputation, which is justifiably lofty. But to humanize Kafka and save him from our ...

Richard Eder, former book critic for The Times, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1987. WHEN Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” appeared posthumously in the 1920s, the German satirist and critic ...

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the ...

All these different elements are presented in detail and probed with subtle, forensic care in Kafka: The Early Years, the first volume of Reiner Stach’s three-part biography, which, by a suitable ...

The story is well known: the frail, anxiety-ridden young man in Prague who suffers under an overbearing, uncouth father. Every day he trudges off to his boring job at an insurance company. He is drawn ...