Karen Reppin Boeken

Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and in this open letter to his father - a letter which was never sent - Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, Dearest Father is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent and highly conflicted relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him, Kafka's inspired work is one of the most lucid and touching psychological documents of the twentieth century.

Writing in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka explored the themes of alienation, anxiety, and solitude in works that were often surreally fantastic. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories collects more than thirty of Kafka's best-known tales in a new translation. They include The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Hunger Artist, A Country Doctor, and A Report to an Academy.