November 13, 2016

 An Afternoon Discussion

 with Kafka  Biographer

Reiner Stach

Sunday,November 13, 2016, 2 to 4pm 

Our guest Dr. Reiner Stach of Berlin, Germany, will present the new face of Franz Kafka and another new book "Is that Kafka? 99 Finds", which emerged in the making of his definitive and monumental three-volume Kafka biography. Dr. Stach will be in San Diego on a book tour for the English translation of the last volume "Kafka: The Early Years" which will be published by Princeton University Press in November 2016.

The winner of numerous awards, including this year's Breitbach Prize, one of Germany's most prestigious literary awards, Dr. Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on his three volume biography.

Our event will mark his first full day of his West Coast book tour, sponsored by Princeton University Press, San Diego State University and the Kafka Project.

Praise for the volumes:

"This is one of the great literary biographies, to be set there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richards Ellmann's James Joyce, George Painter's Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel's Henry James... An eerily immediate portrait of [Kafka] one of literature's most enduring and enigmatic masters."

 John Banville, New York Review of Books

"Scholars and specialists lost and absorbed in the many rooms of the Kafka factory will find much to discuss in the labors of Reiner Stach."

Joy Williams, New York Times Book Review

"This work is a monumental accomplishement with a first-rate translation by scholar Frisch."

Library Journal (Starred Review)

"Stach reads the work and the life with minute care and sympathy. He has a deep understanding of the world that Kafka came from and this is matched by an intelligence and tact about the impulse behind the work itself."

Colm Toibin, Irish Independent

Reiner Stach is a German writer and journalist. His books in English include: "Kafka's Erotic Myth" (Penguin, 1987) and the previous two volumes of Kafka's biography: "Kafka: The Decisive Years" and "Kafka: The Years of Insight" for which he received the 2008 Special Award of the Heimito von Doderer Prize for Literature, which honors a body of narrative work that has developed over decades. Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on his three-volume biography of the writer.

Shelley Frisch's translations of those volumes were awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize. Her many other translations from German include Karin Wieland's Dietrich & Riefenstahl, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.

How did Kafka become Kafka?