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In the Sun, Ben Lytal provides a brief overview to the new translation of Kafka’s stories by Michael Hofmann. It certainly sounds like it’s worth picking up, as are the Shocken translations he mentions, if you don’t have them already.
Now a new volume, “Metamorphosis and Other Stories” (Penguin, 320 pages, $14), also translated by Mr. Hofmann, rounds out this generation of major Kafka translations. By positioning this volume as a collection of everything that Kafka published in his lifetime, Mr. Hofmann pokes another hole in the old image of Kafka as “someone we are encouraged to think of as a publication-averse recluse.” Many of the stories collected here, especially the title story, are extremely well-known. But by packaging “The Metamorphosis” — which has lost the definite article in this translation — with 42 other stories and prose sketches in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, the publishers make a bid to change the way new readers are introduced to Kafka.
Like many recent Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, the cover of “Metamorphosis” has been illustrated by a well-known graphic artist (“Candide” got Chris Ware, “Metamorphosis” gets Sammy Harkham). The stark, modernist faces of yesterday’s Kafka paperbacks are gone. One of Harkham’s drawings, for instance, shows a messy bourgeois scene: Three men sit grumpily at dinner, while a young woman plays a violin and an older man snores in his armchair. A preponderance of detail — armchair, side whiskers, grandfather clock — combines to give the illustration a 19th-century, rather than modern, ambience. And over the whole image looms what seems at first to be a giant willow tree, massing in wavy black bunches that somehow droop, dividing into tendrils, over the bourgeois furniture — until we realize that the black bunches are no tree but, quite sensibly, hordes of little black beetles.
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
