Written by the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—between 1909 and 1924, these letters offer a unique insight into the workings of the Kafka family, their relationship with the Prague Jewish community, and Kafka's own feelings about his parents and siblings. "Kafka's touching letters to his sister, when she was a child and as a young married woman, are beautifully simple, tender, and fresh." —The New York Review of Books A gracious but shy woman, and a silent rebel against the bourgeois society in which she lived, Ottla Kafka was the sibling to whom Kafka felt closest. He had a special affection for her simplicity, her integrity, her ability to listen, and her pride in his work. Ottla was deported to Theresienstadt during World War II, and volunteered to accompany a transport of children to Auschwitz in 1943. She did not survive the war, but her husband and daughters did, and preserved her brother's letters to her. They were published in the original German in 1974, and in English in 1982.

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.

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Kafka’s aphorisms are fascinating glimpses into the lure and the enigma of the form itself. • From the acclaimed author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—and one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. The aphorism eludes definition: it can appear to be a random jotting or a more polished observation. Whether arbitrary fragment or crystalline shard, an aphorism captures the inception of a thought. Franz Kafka composed aphorisms during two periods in his life. A series of 109 was written between September 1917 and April 1918, in Zürau, West Bohemia, while Kafka was on a visit to his sister Ottla, hoping for a brief respite following the diagnosis of the tuberculosis virus that would eventually claim his life. They were originally published in 1931, seven years after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, under the title Betrachtungen über Sünde, Hoffnung, Leid, und den wahren Wag (Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way). The second sequence of aphorisms, numbering 41, originally appeared as entries in Kafka’s diary from January 6 to February 29, 1920. They, too, were published posthumously, under the title “Er”: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahr 1920 (“He”: Reflections from the Year 1920).

Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in August 1912, at the home of his friend Max Brod. Energetic, down-to-earth, and life-affirming, the twenty-five-year-old secretary was everything Kafka was not, and he was instantly smitten. Because he was living in Prague and she in Berlin, his courtship was largely an epistolary one—passionate, self-deprecating, and anxious letters sent almost daily, sometimes even two or three times a day. But soon after their engagement was announced in 1914, Kafka began to worry that marriage would interfere with his writing and his need for solitude. The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice—through their breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final parting in the fall of that year, when Kafka began to feel the effects of the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life—reveal the full measure of his inner turmoil as he tried, in vain, to balance his desire for human connection with what he felt were the solitary demands of his craft.

"Now if there is any one class of their authors whom the American people do know rather better than any other, it is the American humorists, from Washington Irving to Bill Nye... We have tried to arrange our Library so as to include passages representative of every period and section." -The Associate Editors in the modern Introduction to Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1888) Mark Twain's Library of Humor (1875) is a collection of short humorous stories compiled by Mark Twain, including his own essays and those of other popular contemporary writers, such as Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. This jacketed hardcover replica of the 1888 edition of Mark Twain's Library of Humor, with the authentic illustrations by E. W. Kemble, is an entertaining and humorous book for book lovers and Mark Twain aficionados.

Including his most widely recognized short works, as well as two new stories, this translation of Franz Kafka’s writings illuminate one of the century’s most controversial writers. Translated by PEN translation award-winner Joachim Neugroschel, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories has garnered critical acclaim and is widely recognized as the preeminent English-language anthology of Kafka's stories. Neugroschel’s translation of Kafka's work has made this controversial and monumental writing accessible to a whole new generation. This classic collection of forty-one great short works—including such timeless pieces of modern fiction as "The Judgment" and "The Stoker"—now includes two new stories, "First Sorrow" and "The Hunger Artist."