John Ashbery
A stirring, singular work, now restored to its original beauty.

The San Francisco Chronicle
Hofmann's slick, sleek translation does a wonderful job of keeping those competing forces in balance.

The New York Times Book Review
Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.

Washington Post Book World
One can hardly fail to welcome Michael Hofmann's more accurate English text.

New Republic, John Zilcosky, 29 September 2003
Hofmann's translation is invaluable....It achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'

Harvard Book Review, Veronika Tuckerova, Spring 2003
This new translation is more successful in conveying ... a sense of Kafka's unfinished work.

Book Description
Michael Hofmann's superb new translation of Franz Kafka's epic work. Franz Kafka's Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) at last has the translator it deserves. Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, "necessarily endless." Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated - including the book's original "ending."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Franz Kafka's Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) at last has the translator it deserves. Michael Hofmann's startlingly immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world. Karl Rossman, our youthful hero, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated -- including the book's original "ending."

FROM THE CRITICS

John Updike - The New Yorker

A century after his birth he seems the last holy writer,and the supreme fabulist of modern man's cosmic predicament.

Aldous Huxley

His writings are the beautiful and fantastic prolegomena to Buddhism which he never chose to formulate.

Thomas Mann

This fantasy of a New World,so full of a childlike genius...this strange book—Amerika.

Eleanor Clark - The Griffin

Kafka never wrote a more accurate picture of Central Europe than in his novel Amerika.

Eliot Weinberger