Amerika cover art

Amerika

The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text

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Amerika

By: Franz Kafka
Narrated by: George Guidall
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About this listen

 A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before.

With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.

Here is the story of 17-year-old Karl Rossman, who, following a scandal involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. With unquenchable optimism and in the company of two comic-sinister companions, he throws himself into misadventure after misadventure, eventually landing in Oklahoma, where a career in the theater beckons.

Like much of Kafka's work, Amerika remained unfinished at the time of his death. Though we can never know how Kafka planned to end the novel, Mark Harman's superb translation allows us to appreciate as closely as possible, what Kafka did commit to the page.

©2008 Preface and Translation © 2008 Mark Harmon. Publisher's note © 2008 Shocken Books a Division of Random House, Inc. This translation is based on the German language text , Der Verschollebe Kritische Ausguabe, edited by Jost Schillemeit, published by S.Fisher Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in 1983. (c) 1983 by Schoken Books, a division of Random House,Inc. Amerika was originally published in German in different form by Kurt Wolff Verlag A.G.,Munich ,in 1927, (P)2009 Gildan Media Corp Classics Fiction Literary Fiction Misadventure Witty

Critic Reviews

"Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka's nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come." (J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books)

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Profile Image for Omar Shubeilat

Brilliant

I'm a big fan of Kafka! the book is so light-hearted and twisted at the same time, I find Kafka's work to be funny except for Metamorphosis.

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