Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a reading by award-winning translator, writer, and editor Peter Wortsman of Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka. He will be joined by Tess Lewis to discuss the release of his new translation of Kafka’s short prose.

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka’s entire opus of short prose – including works published in the author’s brief lifetime, stories published posthumously, journals, and letters – for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes. Transformed is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka’s signature stories, Die Verwandlung, commonly rendered in English as The Metamorphosis. Composed of short, black-comic parables, fables, fairy tales, reflections, as well as classic stories like In the Penal Colony, Kafka’s uncanny foreshadowing of the Twentieth Century’s nightmare, Konundrumrefreshes the writer’s mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers.