Letters to Felice

Letters to Felice

About the Book

More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924. 

Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, these letters, collected after Kafka's death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.
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Praise for Letters to Felice

“Some of the most heartrending ‘love letters’ ever written.”
—Morris Dickstein, The New York Times Book Review

“Kafka’s correspondence with Felice has all the earmarks of his fiction—the same nervous attention to minute particulars, the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power, the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation—combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight. Taken together, Elias Canetti observes, the letters provide an index of the emotional events that would inspire The Trial—a novel, Canetti argues, in which Kafka’s engagement to Felice is reimagined as the mysterious and menacing arrest of the hero.”
—Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times
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The Schocken Kafka Library Series

The Diaries of Franz Kafka
Letters to Felice
Aphorisms
Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater
Letters to Milena
Letters to Ottla and the Family
Amerika: The Missing Person
Diaries, 1910-1923
The Complete Stories
The Metamorphosis
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About 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.

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About the Author

James Stern

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.

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Elisabeth Duckworth

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.

More by Elisabeth Duckworth
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