The Sons

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The Sons Pub. Date: 8/28/1989 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Overview

"I have only one request," Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. 'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' and 'The Judgment' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forgo the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons." Seventy-five years later, Kafka's request is granted, in a volume including these three classic stories of filial revolt as well as his own poignant "Letter to His Father," another "son story" located between fiction and autobiography. A devastating indictment of the modern family, The Sons represents Kafka's most concentrated literary achievement as well as the story of his own domestic tragedy. Grouped together under this new title and in newly revised translations, these texts -- the like of which Kafka had never written before and (as he claimed at the end of his life) would never again equal -- take on fresh, compelling meaning.

Grouped together under this new title and in newly revised translations, these stories ("The Stoker, " "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment") take on fresh, compelling meaning. Includes his famous "Letter to his Father."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780805208863
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 8/28/1989
Pages: 192
Sales rank: 353,382
Series: Kafka Library
Product dimensions: 5.18 (w) x 7.99 (h) x 0.54 (d)

Meet the Author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

Biography

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The younger Kafka's feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of his work and are made explicit in his "Letter to His Father" (excerpted in this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent.

Kafka was educated in the German language schools of Prague and at the city's German University, where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka's close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod, Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his story "The Stoker" won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on The Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did appear: The Judgment (1916), The Metamorphosis (1916), The Penal Colony (1919), and The Country Doctor (1919).

Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish Kafka's writings. To this act of "betrayal" the world owes the preservation of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our century.

Biography courtesy of BN.com

1. Date of Birth:
  
  July 3, 1883
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Prague, Austria-Hungary
1. Date of Death:
  
  June 3, 1924
2. Place of Death:
  
  Vienna, Austria
1. Education:
  
  German elementary and secondary schools. Graduated from German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague.

	Introduction	vii
	Note on the Translations	xxi
	The Judgment	1
	The Stoker	17
	The Metamorphosis	51
	Letter to His Father	113

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