Lost Writings

I can swim like anyone else, but my memory is better than theirs.
Therefore, I cannot forget that I once could not swim.
And since I cannot forget that, my ability to swim is of no use to me.
In the end, I cannot swim.

***********

In this volume, we present a representative selection from Kafka: a journey inside his mind, the laboratory where ideas were constantly being produced. The aim, above all, is accessibility to the reader: “texts that can be read with ease, not merely linguistic shards or textual variants, but complete pieces that offer a sense of the enormous diversity of literary forms in which Kafka excelled.”

The book also includes around twenty pages of early Kafka texts that have only recently appeared in a new volume of abandoned fragments. Thus the reader is not confined to Kafka’s late works, but is given a panoramic overview of this great master of the literary fragment across all stages of his writing.