Letters to Milena

By Franz Kafka

In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into a passionate but doomed epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenska, 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 the 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.

"The voice of Kafka in Letters to Milena is more personal, more pure, and more painful than in his fiction: a testimony to human existence and to our eternal wait for the impossible.  A marvelous new edition of a classic text."
—Jan Kott

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780804150774

Franz Kafka

Born in Prague in 1883, the son of a self-made Jewish merchant, Franz Kafka trained as a lawyer and worked in insurance. He published little during his lifetime and lived his life in relative obscurity. He was forced to retire from work in 1917 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, a debilitating illness which dogged his final years. When he died in 1924 he bequeathed the – mainly unfinished – manuscripts of his novels, stories, letters and diaries to his friend the writer Max Brod with the strict instruction that they should be destroyed. Brod ignored Kafka’s wishes and organised the publication of his work, including The Trial, which appeared in 1925. It is through Brod’s efforts that Kafka is now regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.