The 20th century is often justifiably referred to as a bloodbath. The 21st century is bloody too, but might more accurately be described as a bubble bath. It was ushered in following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and since then has experienced a housing bubble, a commodities bubble and almost every kind of financial, […]
Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Marbach Literary Archive in Germany have prevented a collection of letters and postcards written by Kafka from being auctioned off and will soon be put on public display, switching between the two prestigious institutions like a child shuttling back and forth between divorced parents. I attended a meeting of Prague’s […]
From 1908 to 1922 Franz Kafka worked at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Considering his work was virtually unknown in his homeland after his death, then banned successively by German occupiers and the communist regime, Kafka’s traces in his former city were not very well guarded. Today though, […]
Franz Kafka never had the fortune, whether good or bad, of being just a writer. During his lifetime he hardly published anything and had a firm principle against making his living with his pen. After his death it became even worse. He went from being a one-man Jewish oracle to a 20th Century prophet of […]
Central European literary life A recurring obstacle to writing about Central European literature is the fact that it apparently doesn’t exist. As recently as this year, when Penguin UK brought out its series of Central European Classics, British novelist Adam Thirlwell began his overview of the collection by writing “I can put it like this. […]
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