Letters to Milena
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Paperback · November 3, 2015
The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.
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- Who it’s for
- A business correspondence opens into a revealing, passionate exchange between Kafka and Milena Jesenská.
- Themes
- Doomed love, Epistolary correspondence, Intimate self-revelation
- Genres
- Letters & Correspondence, German Literary Collections, Writers' Lives
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The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. "Extraordinary…touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking….
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The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." —The New York Times In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
Intimacy in Letters
A business correspondence opens into a revealing, passionate exchange between Kafka and Milena Jesenská.
Come here for
- The charged intimacy of an epistolary love affair
- A rare glimpse of Kafka’s private self
Expect
- Letters that grow personal and emotionally complex
- A relationship described as passionate but doomed
Where it sits
| Letters & Correspondence | 79% |
|---|---|
| Writers' Lives | 63% |
| German Literary Collections | 53% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Writers' Lives
- Letters & Correspondence
- German Literary Criticism
- Authors
- Franz Kafka
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- November 3, 2015
- Format
- Paperback
- Theme
- Doomed love · Epistolary correspondence · Intimate self-revelation
- Reading lane
- Writers' Lives