About the Author

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. He worked most of his adult life at the Worker Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a few of his writings were published during his lifetime; most appeared posthumously.
Mark Harman, a native of Dublin who has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, is a professor of German and English at Elizabeth College in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania. His translation of "The Castle "received the Modern Language Association's first Lois Roth Award in 1998.

Reviews

Praise for Mark Harman s translation of "The Castle
" Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka s nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come.
--J. M. Coetzee, "The New York Review of Books
" There is a great deal to applaud in Harman s translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka s uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English.
--Robert Alter, "The New Republic
" A major and long-awaited event in English language publishing [and] a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers, who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka s original manuscript.
--Professor Mark M. Anderson, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University"

Praise for Mark Harman's translation of "The Castle

""Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka's nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come."
--J. M. Coetzee, "The New York Review of Books

""There is a great deal to applaud in Harman's translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka's uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English."
--Robert Alter, "The New Republic

""A major and long-awaited event in English language publishing [and] a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers, who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka's original manuscript."
--Professor Mark M. Anderson, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University