Description
In this new translation, Michael Hofmann returned to Kafka's manuscripts, restoring matters of substance and detail and reinstating fragments — including the book's original ending. Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world: a Kafka shot through with light in a highly charged and enormously nuanced rendering. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, 'necessarily endless.' Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, 'a poor boy of seventeen,' has been banished by his parents to America following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to the Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
Endorsements
"Hofmann's sleek translation does a wonderful job." — The San Francisco Chronicle
"Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann." — The New York Times
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