Description: "One of the most astonishing and revelatory pieces of writing ever produced by this twentieth-century literary icon, presented in both the original German and the English translation. Kafka's letter to his father is at once an exploration of his relationship to his father, his need to write, and the source of his fear--one that his father prompts in him but that is beyond the scope of Kafka's memory and power of reasoning. There is no greater text about authority, the disfiguring effects of shame, and, in particular, Kafka's lifelong need to have his father's unobtainable approval"--
Review Quotes: "This is the closest we have to Kafka's memoirs, a story of mutual misunderstanding and alienation, charted in a series of evocatively sketched scenes.... For all its power of psychological analysis, the tone is rarely self-pitying but almost forensically detached.... The fact that Kafka nearly always gives his father the benefit of the doubt makes his accusations all the more devastating." --The Times Literary Supplement
"Kafka's principal attempt at self-clarification is also one of the great confessions of literature." --The New York Times Book Review