Konundrum

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka’s entire opus of short prose–including works published in the author’s brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters–for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes Transformed is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka’s signature stories, Die Verwandlung, commonly rendered in English as The Metamorphosis.
Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like In the Penal Colony, Kafka’s prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer’s mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers.
Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer’s Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)