Provan, Alexander. "An Alienation Artist: Kafka and his Critics." NATION February 11, 2009.

The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the walls of every dentist's waiting room, the photograph of his stony countenance and doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-in for his vision of the world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else, including the cover of novelist Louis Begley's recent book-length biographical essay on Kafka, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. His stories are still read widely--less so his novels--but have in the popular imagination been subsumed by a one-word slogan: Kafkaesque. That grainy likeness is its logo. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/provan/single?rel=nofollow.

Wood, Michael. "Double Thought." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS November 20, 2008.

Kafka, Franz. The Office Writings. Ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner. Trans. Eric Patton and Ruth Hein. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance. Born in 1883, he trained as a lawyer, worked briefly for an Italian insurance company in Prague, the Assicurazioni Generali, and then in 1908 took a position with the institute, where he remained until he resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1922. He died in 1924. We may not believe, as we are told in the preface to The Office Writings, a selection from his legal and clerical work, that ‘much of Kafka’s greatness . . . is owed to his office job,’ but we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will strengthen ‘our sense of the conditions under which Kafka accomplished his nocturnal writing’ – the writing he did, that is, when he got home from the office. The editors of this volume are understandably eager to make literal, referential connections between Kafka’s office work and his fiction, and their texts of choice are ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘The Great Wall of China’, Amerika and The Castle. But their real point, and the real interest of this book, is rather different, and hinges on the idea of the Kafkaesque. We follow Kafka through reports and claims and arguments and petitions concerning building trades, wooden toys, quarries, farms, automobiles, trade inspections, risk assessments, accident prevention, the effects of the war on insurance premiums and practices, what to do about the apparitions the war has thrown onto the city streets: ‘men who could move ahead only by taking jerky steps; poor, pale and gaunt, they leaped as though a merciless hand held them by the neck, tossing them back and forth in their tortured movements.’ This is a pretty gripping image, but I can’t pretend the texts as a whole make for lively reading, or that they are full of secret literary treasures. They are dense, detailed, local, and they hold your (or my) attention because they really do give you a sense of consuming office work, a set of tasks where the spectre of boredom and a necessarily intense concentration go hand in hand. This is very much how Kafka, in his letters, talks about his job; but he was also, as the editors insist, often proud of it. He complained about it incessantly, but he took it seriously and he did it well. If he was just coasting, as one of his officials might say, he wouldn’t have complained so much. And reading these office writings I began to wonder whether the Kafkaesque is not, as the OED tautologically says, the name of a ‘state of affairs or a state of mind described by Kafka’, but rather a form of strangeness that is more ordinary than we think. We call it strange because we want it to be strange. Kafka didn’t simply describe it, and he didn’t invent it. He blew its cover, and more important still, revealed its alarming frequency. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n22/wood01_.html.

Kirsch, Adam. "America, 'Amerika.'" NEW YORK TIMES January 2, 2009.

Kafka, Franz. Amerika: the Missing Person. Trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schoken, 2008. Now Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka’s works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. “If approached afresh,” Harman promises in his introduction, “this book could bear out the early claim by . . . Brod that ‘precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.’” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all.

Bronner, Ethan. "Under ‘Kafkaesque’ Pressure, Heir to Kafka Papers May Yield Them." NEW YORK TIMES August 17, 2008.

Franz Kafka’s final wish before his death in 1924 — that his papers be burned — was famously defied by his friend, the writer Max Brod. The world got “The Trial,” “The Castle” and the adjective Kafkaesque; Mr. Brod got the papers. When Mr. Brod fled to Tel Aviv from Prague on the last train out in 1939 as the Nazis rolled in, he had with him a suitcase full of Kafka’s documents. Here, he took up with his secretary, and when he died in 1968, he bequeathed to her the remaining Kafka papers, as well as his own from a rich cultural career. For nearly 40 years, the secretary, Esther Hoffe, held the world of Kafka scholarship on tenterhooks, keeping the documents in her ground-floor apartment on Spinoza Street, some of them piled high on her desk (it was originally Mr. Brod’s), where she typed all day and took her meals. The last time a scholar was permitted into the apartment was in the 1980s. Later, Ms. Hoffe sold the manuscript for “The Trial” for $2 million. No one knows what remains. Since her death last year at age 101, her 74-year-old daughter, Hava, has indicated that a decision about the coveted papers will be made in the coming months. While most of the Kafka estate is already in archives in the Czech Republic, Britain and Germany, some may still be inside the scuffed front door of the Hoffe apartment. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/world/18kafka.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.