Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$9.99

Available instantly

Hardcover
$15.68

Paperback
$14.59

List Price: $15.95 Details

Save: $1.36 (9%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, March 29 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, March 27. Order within 11 hrs 47 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$14.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$3.99 delivery March 28 - April 1. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Like New | Details

Sold by SFBayGoodwill

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$11.95
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: indoobestsellers

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Gustav Janouch

Follow

Conversations with Kafka (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – January 26, 2012

by Gustav Janouch (Author), Goronwy Rees (Translator), Francine Prose (Introduction),

37

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$14.59","priceAmount":14.59,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"14","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"59","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"7SxtryL0TKymMOnHCFLuYXWdBmfRyaiaEsHtYgQMmswKSpDpBjkHFHBeMlje9NwAIen4vpZXlQwbktDzM5rzDX8NBk8OT5g7QJL9fkRbTmBs%2BqjEtCEfVUKi4cNaVeL20Uv5gCWjFpTMHq0bAzZQnA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$5.88","priceAmount":5.88,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"5","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"88","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"7SxtryL0TKymMOnHCFLuYXWdBmfRyaia%2B3XG7HPcIGGLxa2ugw3hjK%2FIQ%2Fy81DhFmkbWaH5tYhDyxFRBHYxE%2FbfuACvmrOrnBx%2FnCQbXeCIw7Yob%2FtdhSULCjVgHqwc38rq7Pt%2FsqjJGuhCUaF94AMsFWaWpIO5x%2FmZC8WDRq8AtmTys3f%2B6hm4%2B1OTC494t","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A literary gem – a portrait from life of Franz Kafka – now with an ardent preface by Francine Prose, avowed “fan of Janouch’s odd and beautiful book.”

Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, “they fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, ‘Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.’”

They talk about writing (Kafka’s own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who “transforms vowels into colors”) as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. “Prayer,” Kafka notes, brings “its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.”

Print length

228 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

January 26, 2012
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

081121950X
ISBN-13

978-0811219501
See all details

Franz Kafka
708
Paperback
55 offers from $12.74
Reiner Stach
53
Paperback
35 offers from $8.95

Editorial Reviews

Review

Kafka is for me one of the last, and therefore perhaps one of the greatest, because closest to us, of mankind s religious and ethical teachers. --Gustav Janouch"

Stunning. --Leonard Michaels"

This remarkable book, itself the result of a miraculous discovery of material believed lost, is one of the most exciting works fiction, nonfiction, poetry I remember having read. --Joyce Carol Oates"

Stunning. --Leonard Michaels

Stunning.--Leonard Michaels

About the Author

Gustav Janouch (1903–1968) was a young poet whose father worked at the same insurance company as Kafka. A certain amount of controversy has been aroused by his Conversations with Kafka: some have been skeptical that any human being can talk the way Kafka does in this book, but both Max Brod and Dora Diamant considered it authentic.

Born in Brooklyn, Francine Prose has published fourteen novels. The Washington Post has called her work a “sheer delight.”

Goronwy Rees (1909 –1979) was a Welsh journalist, academic, translator and writer.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; Second edition (January 26, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 228 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 081121950X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811219501
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.47 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,217,592 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #204 in German Literary Criticism (Books)
- #6,222 in Author Biographies

Customer Reviews:
37

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Gustav Janouch

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

37 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Justine E

Great light reading.

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is one of my favorite books. It’s a really intimate look into who Franz Kafka was outside of his own writing. I find a new gem each time I read it, and it’s become my go to gift for all of my Kafka loving friends.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Ronnie Bosch

there is an authentic sound to the pronouncements and they are given with a fine balance between arrogance and humility that see

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2016

What a welcome surprise to the Kafka literature! I chanced upon this book in a friend's library where it had been sitting probably since the 1974 if my friend's dating of acquisition was followed by reading. Janouch must have hurried home after each encounter with mentor Kafka to record these aphorisims with anything approaching accuracy. Whatever, there is an authentic sound to the pronouncements and they are given with a fine balance between arrogance and humility that seems to fit the general picture we have of K. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Rhadamanthus

Illuminating

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

Kafka expanding on his views for an interlocutor much younger than himself. Shows him as a wide-ranging intellectual of rather idealistic inclinations and a powerful sense of the evil of modern times.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Storko

A great literary and insightful biographical work

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2000

Amusing, affecting, and sometimes downright profound, the utterances of Kafka--as documented by his friend, Gustav Janouch--stand without parallel in 20th century literature. Even when read in a translation from the original German, one cannot help but be moved by the wisdom, insight, humor and poetry of Kafka's words. This book stands on par with Kafka's published novels and parables, and I give it my highest recommendation.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Eric H. Roth

Deep Insights in Concise Bites

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2000

Absolutely wonderful. I found this delightful book far more accessible and practical than Kafka's beautiful, but very grim, short stories and novels. Kafka's conversations with a 17 year old poet show the very human side of this literary genius. Perhaps best of all, you can open almost any page and find an insightful dialog. Kafka, like many other ignored prophets, anticipated the madness of the Holocaust caused by pervasive prejudice, a cult of bureaucratic procedures, and deep fear of exceptional souls who don't follow the official line.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

R. M. Peterson

"God, Life, Truth - they are only different names which we give to one fact."

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2013

Gustav Janouch's father was a colleague of Franz Kafka's at the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Through his father, the seventeen-year-old Gustav, an aspiring literary type, was introduced to Kafka about 1920. Kafka, twenty years older, assumed the role of intellectual mentor to Gustav, who in turn was a worshipful acolyte and, apparently, a Boswell, dutifully recording every exchange he had with Kafka over the next two or so years before Kafka, his health deteriorating, left his position at the Institute.

Shortly after WWII, Janouch was persuaded to publish his notes of Kafka, and in 1951 Max Brod (Kafka's literary executor) brought out the first edition of CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA. That edition, according to Janouch, was incomplete; Brod somehow had omitted much of the best material. Some time later, Janouch discovered the rest of his original typed manuscript in a dilapidated old cardboard box in his former house that no longer was inhabited. And so, in 1971, a second, expanded edition of CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA was published. It was re-issued last year by New Directions with a distinctive cover portrait of Kafka by Maira Kalman and a fine introduction by Francine Prose.

The entire book should be taken with a large grain of salt. First, there are questions of authenticity and accuracy, among them, of course: Did Kafka really say everything that Janouch quotes him as saying? Even if one accepts the bona fides and good faith of Janouch (which I do), there are plenty of reasons to question whether Janouch accurately reports what Kafka actually said. And while the portrait of Kafka - his physical appearance, his mannerisms, his personality - is an engaging one, it is the portrait of a votary, who no doubt was impressionable and for whom Kafka surely was projecting a calculated image. And I suspect that Janouch's presentation was influenced by intervening events, especially the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Throughout the book, Kafka practically smothers Janouch (and the reader) with adages and advice. Nothing is said lightly or frivolously. Instead, Kafka takes scrupulous care with words, and virtually everything he says is thoughtful, philosophical, moral, portentous. The entire book comes across like a variation on the cliché of the guru on a mountain ledge being visited by an enthusiastic, puppy-like disciple.

Still, there is much of merit to the book, especially for someone who already is familiar with the work and life of Franz Kafka. (A corollary is that one should not rely on CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA as one's principal source for an understanding of the man or his work.) Much of what Kafka is recorded as saying is interesting, including his observations on other cultural or intellectual figures, such as Søren Kierkegaard, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charlie Chaplin, and Walt Whitman. And there are plenty of distinctive aphorisms that one feels compelled to mark for future reference. Regarding these, I end up feeling much the same as Francine Prose: "If Kafka didn't say all these things, he said some of them and should have said the rest."

Here is one of them, the same one, incidentally, that Francine Prose chose to highlight: "Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean."

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jessie Zhao

Take this book with a grain of salt. It's ...

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2017

Take this book with a grain of salt. It's highly unlikely that Kafka was actually dropping perfectly generated aphorisms left and right, but other aspects of the book: his appearance, his behavior, the ideas and memories that haunt him (this takes place in 1920, after Kafka wrote his most famous works and attempted to get married)...these are all accurate and can be backed up by other sources.

Do not use this as a hard primary source on Kafka's literary work or his stance on philosophy/theology/psychology whatever. The true value of this book is using it as a character study.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Julie C.

Reality Check

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2017

After reading this book, I am astounded that it has been accepted as an authentic account of actual conversations with Kafka. I am convinced this book is a piece of fiction. The thematic continuity of Kafka's statements is clearly artificial. Nothing in Kafka's actual diaries and letters establishes precedent for this pedagogical proclivity. Kafka was a visionary, not an ideologue. He was maverick, not a mentor; a true modernist, not a post-romantic apologist. The bottom line is: do any of the statements attributed to Franz Kafka in this text sound like any of his authenticated texts? No. Not in the slightest. No! ---

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

simon keeton

It gives new insights into the writer's mind.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2021

Verified Purchase

Kafka was not old when he died and one wonders how he gained such layers of perception which he expresses so fluently. One wonders if he actually did express himself with such fluency. The reader is also amazed at the advanced nature of the narrator who was only seventeen at the time!

All in all, an interesting collection of anecdotes and stories.

Placeholder

Kafka

Reviewed in India on July 11, 2019

Verified Purchase

Good collection of Kafka's remarks on different subjects

IC

Pleased with the book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

Item as described and arrived on time, despite coronavirus-related difficulties with delivery.

See more reviews

Return this item for free