What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lost Writings
Unearthed by the master Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, this collection comes as a prize and a joy. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long. Lost to English-language readers until now, all are marvels: even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. Has any writer given so many pleasures and mysteries, and both so unstintingly.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2020
74 people are currently reading
802 people want to read
About the author
Franz Kafka
3,231 books38.6k followersFranz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka grew up amid German, Czech, and Jewish cultural influences that shaped his sense of displacement and linguistic precision. His difficult relationship with his authoritarian father left a lasting mark, fostering feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inadequacy that became central themes in his fiction and personal writings.
Kafka studied law at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1906. He chose law for practical reasons rather than personal inclination, a compromise that troubled him throughout his life. After university, he worked for several insurance institutions, most notably the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties included assessing industrial accidents and drafting legal reports, work he carried out competently and responsibly. Nevertheless, Kafka regarded his professional life as an obstacle to his true vocation, and most of his writing was done at night or during periods of illness and leave. Kafka began publishing short prose pieces in his early adulthood, later collected in volumes such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor. These works attracted little attention at the time but already displayed the hallmarks of his mature style, including precise language, emotional restraint, and the application of calm logic to deeply unsettling situations. His major novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were left unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. They depict protagonists trapped within opaque systems of authority, facing accusations, rules, or hierarchies that remain unexplained and unreachable. Themes of alienation, guilt, bureaucracy, law, and punishment run throughout Kafka’s work. His characters often respond to absurd or terrifying circumstances with obedience or resignation, reflecting his own conflicted relationship with authority and obligation. Kafka’s prose avoids overt symbolism, yet his narratives function as powerful metaphors through structure, repetition, and tone. Ordinary environments gradually become nightmarish without losing their internal coherence. Kafka’s personal life was marked by emotional conflict, chronic self-doubt, and recurring illness. He formed intense but troubled romantic relationships, including engagements that he repeatedly broke off, fearing that marriage would interfere with his writing. His extensive correspondence and diaries reveal a relentless self-critic, deeply concerned with morality, spirituality, and the demands of artistic integrity. In his later years, Kafka’s health deteriorated due to tuberculosis, forcing him to withdraw from work and spend long periods in sanatoriums. Despite his illness, he continued writing when possible. He died young, leaving behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. Before his death, he instructed his close friend Max Brod to destroy all of his remaining work. Brod ignored this request and instead edited and published Kafka’s novels, stories, and diaries, ensuring his posthumous reputation.
The publication of Kafka’s work after his death established him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The term Kafkaesque entered common usage to describe situations marked by oppressive bureaucracy, absurd logic, and existential anxiety. His writing has been interpreted through existential, religious, psychological, and political perspectives, though Kafka himself resisted definitive meanings. His enduring power lies in his ability to articulate modern anxiety with clarity and restraint.
Kafka studied law at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1906. He chose law for practical reasons rather than personal inclination, a compromise that troubled him throughout his life. After university, he worked for several insurance institutions, most notably the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties included assessing industrial accidents and drafting legal reports, work he carried out competently and responsibly. Nevertheless, Kafka regarded his professional life as an obstacle to his true vocation, and most of his writing was done at night or during periods of illness and leave. Kafka began publishing short prose pieces in his early adulthood, later collected in volumes such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor. These works attracted little attention at the time but already displayed the hallmarks of his mature style, including precise language, emotional restraint, and the application of calm logic to deeply unsettling situations. His major novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were left unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. They depict protagonists trapped within opaque systems of authority, facing accusations, rules, or hierarchies that remain unexplained and unreachable. Themes of alienation, guilt, bureaucracy, law, and punishment run throughout Kafka’s work. His characters often respond to absurd or terrifying circumstances with obedience or resignation, reflecting his own conflicted relationship with authority and obligation. Kafka’s prose avoids overt symbolism, yet his narratives function as powerful metaphors through structure, repetition, and tone. Ordinary environments gradually become nightmarish without losing their internal coherence. Kafka’s personal life was marked by emotional conflict, chronic self-doubt, and recurring illness. He formed intense but troubled romantic relationships, including engagements that he repeatedly broke off, fearing that marriage would interfere with his writing. His extensive correspondence and diaries reveal a relentless self-critic, deeply concerned with morality, spirituality, and the demands of artistic integrity. In his later years, Kafka’s health deteriorated due to tuberculosis, forcing him to withdraw from work and spend long periods in sanatoriums. Despite his illness, he continued writing when possible. He died young, leaving behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. Before his death, he instructed his close friend Max Brod to destroy all of his remaining work. Brod ignored this request and instead edited and published Kafka’s novels, stories, and diaries, ensuring his posthumous reputation.
The publication of Kafka’s work after his death established him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The term Kafkaesque entered common usage to describe situations marked by oppressive bureaucracy, absurd logic, and existential anxiety. His writing has been interpreted through existential, religious, psychological, and political perspectives, though Kafka himself resisted definitive meanings. His enduring power lies in his ability to articulate modern anxiety with clarity and restraint.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
October 31, 2020
"'You are forever speaking of death and not dying.'Extracted from the Israeli archives by Reiner Stach and recently translated by Michael Hofmann, this collection gives us a few words more of Kafka's swan song. (About the Brod/Kafka manuscripts and Israel, see Benjamin Balint's excellent book: Kafka's Last Trial.)
'And yet die I shall. I am just intoning my swan song. One person's song is longer, another's shorter. The only difference is a few words.'" (65)
The 'lost' writings—some published in English for the first time—range from fragments to short stories running several pages; most of them are unfinished but some are fairly complete (although with Kafka nothing is, of course, ever complete). For what it's worth, my rating reflects the collection itself—the sum of everything that has helped to bring it into existence. To rate the writings, as one might rate short stories in a published collection, would have little meaning. The pieces are significant more than they are good; and some are, in fact, quite good. The collection as a whole has Kafka's mind all over it. We find musings, story ideas, observations, fears, moods, wit, playfulness, and self-flagellation...
February 18, 2023
For someone like me, just getting to know Kafka’s work, this little volume (approx 130 pages) is an absolute gem.
For now, I’ve lightly read through most of these fragments, but I’m sure I’ll be coming back again and again. It’s the sort of volume that I doubt you’d ever really be ‘done’ with. In what seems to true Kafka form, nothing is ever finished!
The intro tells me that all the pieces are taken from the two large volumes of the S.Fischer Verlag edition ‘Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente’.
I’ll be interested to know what more experienced readers of Kafka’s work think!
For now, I’ve lightly read through most of these fragments, but I’m sure I’ll be coming back again and again. It’s the sort of volume that I doubt you’d ever really be ‘done’ with. In what seems to true Kafka form, nothing is ever finished!
The intro tells me that all the pieces are taken from the two large volumes of the S.Fischer Verlag edition ‘Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente’.
I’ll be interested to know what more experienced readers of Kafka’s work think!
Read
November 6, 2020"You don't have to leave the house. Stay at your desk and listen. Or don't even listen, wait for it to bother you. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it cannot do otherwise, it will writhe in front of you in ecstasies."
It seems that there is a considerable amount of Kafka's writings that some of us have been completely unaware of. Many of these writings are considered "fragments." And right now, on November 5, 2020, we are surrounded by fragments: fragments of information, fragments of truth, fragments of reality. I tried to start a novel yesterday and it seems that I simply couldn't. I kept trying, but my attention dissipated after a page or two. But picking up The Lost Writings of Franz Kafka, I was suddenly enveloped in a world that made sense. These disjointed, unrelated, bits of writings that, although they may have been officially completed by their author, felt incomplete - and that felt so very appropriate. Reading this book perfectly paralleled my continual checking and re-checking of incomplete or insufficient election results. In fact, this perpetual refreshing of my phone's screen in hopes of finding any new nugget of information feels like I've stepping right into a Kafka fragment with both feet.
Reiner Stach, THE Kafka biographer, selected the pieces that became The Lost Writings from the second, bulky volume of Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente. These fragments that make up this new, svelte volume range from a few pages to a few lines. It's not uncommon for them to end mid-thought; it's not even uncommon for them to end mid-sentence. However, it's not that these writings are merely scraps that have swept from Kafka's desk. And to read them back to back, it doesn't feel at all like they are throwaways. Rather, they proffer a kind of mood that one only gets from Kafka. Even if the story is incomplete, the mood itself has been created completely. He could do so much with so little.
Stach states in the afterword that the "selection seeks above all to be accessible: these texts are highly approachable, "readable" pieces - not mere linguistic shards or variants but substantive texts giving a sense of the enormous array of literary forms of which Kafka was such a great master."
Having such a distinctive and singular mode, it's hard to imagine a Kafka piece that wouldn't be "readable." And it was a great pleasure to spend the time with these fragments and to return to that voice of Kafka - which, of course, is accessed through Michael Hofmann, the praised and prized translator of all things Deutsch.
I'm still not so sure I can articulate what it is about Kafka that is so pleasurable just on a sentence level. I think maybe it has to do with reading a sentence that makes the preceding sentence (which was itself, rather unremarkable) suddenly seem completely incoherent or illogical or impossible. Occasionally, it's the end of a sentence that then throws its beginning into disarray. He uses this to such comic effect that I wind up using the word "delightful" to describe even his darker stories.
Here's an example chosen (nearly) at random:
"You see, I can't really swim at all. I always wanted to learn, but I never had an occasion to. So how come I was sent by my country to participate in the Olympic Games?"
I read somewhere that Stach didn't so much like the title, The Lost Writings. He implied that it was incorrect to call them "lost" since they were never really lost to begin with. However, if you are feeling lost or if you are part of a community or a society or a country that feels lost...
Perhaps I will embrace the fragment style and leave that thought incomplete.
It seems that there is a considerable amount of Kafka's writings that some of us have been completely unaware of. Many of these writings are considered "fragments." And right now, on November 5, 2020, we are surrounded by fragments: fragments of information, fragments of truth, fragments of reality. I tried to start a novel yesterday and it seems that I simply couldn't. I kept trying, but my attention dissipated after a page or two. But picking up The Lost Writings of Franz Kafka, I was suddenly enveloped in a world that made sense. These disjointed, unrelated, bits of writings that, although they may have been officially completed by their author, felt incomplete - and that felt so very appropriate. Reading this book perfectly paralleled my continual checking and re-checking of incomplete or insufficient election results. In fact, this perpetual refreshing of my phone's screen in hopes of finding any new nugget of information feels like I've stepping right into a Kafka fragment with both feet.
Reiner Stach, THE Kafka biographer, selected the pieces that became The Lost Writings from the second, bulky volume of Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente. These fragments that make up this new, svelte volume range from a few pages to a few lines. It's not uncommon for them to end mid-thought; it's not even uncommon for them to end mid-sentence. However, it's not that these writings are merely scraps that have swept from Kafka's desk. And to read them back to back, it doesn't feel at all like they are throwaways. Rather, they proffer a kind of mood that one only gets from Kafka. Even if the story is incomplete, the mood itself has been created completely. He could do so much with so little.
Stach states in the afterword that the "selection seeks above all to be accessible: these texts are highly approachable, "readable" pieces - not mere linguistic shards or variants but substantive texts giving a sense of the enormous array of literary forms of which Kafka was such a great master."
Having such a distinctive and singular mode, it's hard to imagine a Kafka piece that wouldn't be "readable." And it was a great pleasure to spend the time with these fragments and to return to that voice of Kafka - which, of course, is accessed through Michael Hofmann, the praised and prized translator of all things Deutsch.
I'm still not so sure I can articulate what it is about Kafka that is so pleasurable just on a sentence level. I think maybe it has to do with reading a sentence that makes the preceding sentence (which was itself, rather unremarkable) suddenly seem completely incoherent or illogical or impossible. Occasionally, it's the end of a sentence that then throws its beginning into disarray. He uses this to such comic effect that I wind up using the word "delightful" to describe even his darker stories.
Here's an example chosen (nearly) at random:
"You see, I can't really swim at all. I always wanted to learn, but I never had an occasion to. So how come I was sent by my country to participate in the Olympic Games?"
I read somewhere that Stach didn't so much like the title, The Lost Writings. He implied that it was incorrect to call them "lost" since they were never really lost to begin with. However, if you are feeling lost or if you are part of a community or a society or a country that feels lost...
Perhaps I will embrace the fragment style and leave that thought incomplete.
December 12, 2023
I can deal with fragmented writing because life is very fragmented.
October 27, 2020
Of course Kafka always gets me with the Marxist absurdism, but what these small fragments, some of them only a paragraph long (although as the afterwards reminds us, all of Kafka's books are also fragments) remind me is how good Kafka is at setting a scene. How can he pack in the most mundane and overlooked features of a room to set the tone of a scene, all in only a paragraph??
November 30, 2020
This selection of Kafka's lost microfiction is some of his best writing IMO. Well worth a read for fans!
March 1, 2021
This is such a lovingly edited collection of Kafka fragments and shorts! It's exciting to have some of these appearing for the first time in English and, like other reviewers have noted, I too found myself grinning as I read and needing to make myself stop reading so I wouldn't gorge them too quickly.
As Reiner Stach notes in his afterword (which, I quibble, would be more informative as a foreword), the unique difficulties in compiling and presenting Kafka's (prolific) literary fragments have resulted in most Kafka readers only getting, "the tip of the iceberg, with its gigantic base obscured from sight," (p. 134).
Ranging in length from just a few sentences to several pages, each of these stories are sparkling. It's Kafka at his finest - absurd and humorous, gentle but chaotic, inviting yet nightmarish. Each story offers potential for rich analysis. Scenes from the Defense of a Farm, for example, is a cartoonish tale about an army defending a farm from some unknown enemy. It examines the bizarre mechanics of war and the strange appeal of military combat as entertainment, even when the conflict seemingly has no purpose.
As Reiner Stach notes in his afterword (which, I quibble, would be more informative as a foreword), the unique difficulties in compiling and presenting Kafka's (prolific) literary fragments have resulted in most Kafka readers only getting, "the tip of the iceberg, with its gigantic base obscured from sight," (p. 134).
Ranging in length from just a few sentences to several pages, each of these stories are sparkling. It's Kafka at his finest - absurd and humorous, gentle but chaotic, inviting yet nightmarish. Each story offers potential for rich analysis. Scenes from the Defense of a Farm, for example, is a cartoonish tale about an army defending a farm from some unknown enemy. It examines the bizarre mechanics of war and the strange appeal of military combat as entertainment, even when the conflict seemingly has no purpose.
Read
August 19, 2024«من میتوانم مثل دیگران شنا کنم. فقط من حافظهای بهتر از بقیه دارم، بنابراین قادر نبودهام فراموش کنم که قبلا قادر به شنا کردن نبودهام. از آنجا که قادر به فراموش کردن نبودهام، اکنون نمیتوانم شنا کنم.»
October 18, 2020
Selecionadas pelo proeminente biógrafo e estudioso de Kafka ,Reiner Stach ,e recentemente traduzidas pelo incomparável Michael Hofmann, as setenta e quatro peças reunidas aqui foram perdidas de vista por décadas e duas delas nunca foram traduzidas nem para o inglês . Algumas histórias têm várias páginas; algumas apenas uma ; um punhado tem apenas algumas linhas:mas todas são maravilhosas! Mesmo os fragmentos são revelações de uma deliciosa história que estava por vir e que nunca saberemos o final.
As descrições são maravilhosas, você se sente participando da cena, consegue visualizar as expressões e os movimento dos personagens.
Apaixonado que sou pelo talento de kafka, fiquei maravilhado.
As descrições são maravilhosas, você se sente participando da cena, consegue visualizar as expressões e os movimento dos personagens.
Apaixonado que sou pelo talento de kafka, fiquei maravilhado.
October 25, 2025
interesting, a collection of his fragmentary writings. dream-like.
January 7, 2021
hilariously funny and so so fun. a little like the big orange head joke--someone who wouldn't love this book is not someone I want to know, at least not closely. first book in a long time that i had to force myself to stop reading so as not to use it all up in one day...i read the whole thing smiling, made me so happy. can't recommend highly enough.
September 16, 2020
Notice the use of an “o” rather than “a” in the title’s adjective. The presumptive last unpublished writings of Kafka are among a previously unexamined trove of papers by Kafka from the Max Brod estate that the Israeli government confiscated a couple of years ago in an international dispute over rights to Kafka’s material legacy. So, we have the lost to tide us over until the last arrive.
And what we have is what we long for from Kafka: new parables and gnomic ironies rendered in tones simultaneously realist, fatalist, and Talmudic. Almost all are fragments, scraps running from one paragraph to four pages. But in Kafka, setting and tone are inseparable from fate, which Kafka has a knack for establishing in one or two sentences. “Kafkaesque irony” often means that, though the possibilities before us are endless, our fate is singular and unavoidable.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is a seamlessly idiomatic American English, though devoid of contemporary anachronisms.
And what we have is what we long for from Kafka: new parables and gnomic ironies rendered in tones simultaneously realist, fatalist, and Talmudic. Almost all are fragments, scraps running from one paragraph to four pages. But in Kafka, setting and tone are inseparable from fate, which Kafka has a knack for establishing in one or two sentences. “Kafkaesque irony” often means that, though the possibilities before us are endless, our fate is singular and unavoidable.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is a seamlessly idiomatic American English, though devoid of contemporary anachronisms.
October 18, 2024
4.5 stars. If you are a fan of Kafka then this is a must-read. More than a collection of his literary fragments, it actually tells stories and gives another eye into Kafka's mind. He was full of ideas, even if many of them didn't come to fruition. I docked half a star for some uncomfortable racial words used but these are few, far-between, and rarely meant in a negative way considering his time period.
April 16, 2021
4.5 stars. Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8aUx...
January 1, 2021
A short collection of bits and pieces reflecting Kafka's view of the world. The Lost Writings seems to be assorted scraps, ideas, drafts, and sketches that were meant to be developed into longer pieces. Beginnings written to see if anything came of them, if they would grow into something more. The kind of bits and bobs that a writer might jot down to come back to later and expand. Notes, attempts, trial runs. None of them truly seems essential except to someone who needs to read everything extant. When I discovered Kafka in high school, I couldn't get enough. Here was someone who said that I wasn't alone in my solitary alienation, the occasionally bleak and hopeless worldview of adolescence. My scribblings about my outsider-looking-in sentiments didn't feel quite so shameful. Some of these remnants are funny, clever, interesting or amusing. None really contains a complete thought, a beginning, middle, and end. The Lost Writings is for devout Kafka fangirls and students only. Note: the hardback cover is designed to look well-worn, as if often read at the dinner table, as if the book was found at the very back of a high, dusty shelf in a charity shop or used-book store.
February 18, 2024
Because Kafka often writes parables, his best fragments are unusually engaging. Sadly, these are not his best.
Read
February 27, 2023rip kafka you would’ve loved twitter 😔🙏
August 10, 2021
Breathtaking brevity.
Yes, we should all love the wild and woolly surrealism of The Trial and The Metamorphosis. "Kafkaesque" is a well-trodden adjective for a reason. But the reason those stories are so powerful is because of Kafka's prodigious talent with the written word.
This collection should be the first piece of evidence used in legal proceedings to shift the definition of "Kafkaesque" from something outlandish and riddled with frustrating circular logic of bureaucratic mismanagement. Instead, that word should instead mean "striking and captivating in its stark simplicity." These literal literary fragments are better, more engaging works of fiction than full-scale novels crafted by best-selling authors.
Call it flash fiction, micro fiction, or whatever descriptor you might prefer for snippets often barely 100 words in length. But these stories pack an absolute wallop in terms of the pure craft on display, as Kafka possesses an otherworldly ability to set a stage, introduce characters, bring tension, and capture your attention with as few words as possible.
This slim volume should be read and studied by writers and lovers of good writing for many years to come.
Yes, we should all love the wild and woolly surrealism of The Trial and The Metamorphosis. "Kafkaesque" is a well-trodden adjective for a reason. But the reason those stories are so powerful is because of Kafka's prodigious talent with the written word.
This collection should be the first piece of evidence used in legal proceedings to shift the definition of "Kafkaesque" from something outlandish and riddled with frustrating circular logic of bureaucratic mismanagement. Instead, that word should instead mean "striking and captivating in its stark simplicity." These literal literary fragments are better, more engaging works of fiction than full-scale novels crafted by best-selling authors.
Call it flash fiction, micro fiction, or whatever descriptor you might prefer for snippets often barely 100 words in length. But these stories pack an absolute wallop in terms of the pure craft on display, as Kafka possesses an otherworldly ability to set a stage, introduce characters, bring tension, and capture your attention with as few words as possible.
This slim volume should be read and studied by writers and lovers of good writing for many years to come.
November 13, 2020
It’s hard to have any strong feelings about this slim volume of “re-discovered“ works. They are less rediscovered and more extracted from all of the body of Kafka’s writings that weren’t considered publishable even by his estate up until recently.
There are some small bits that are only momentary seams, and there are some that are fully fleshed out scenarios, and there are some that strike me as extracts from dreams. But many of them are terribly forgettable which is a shame.
There are some small bits that are only momentary seams, and there are some that are fully fleshed out scenarios, and there are some that strike me as extracts from dreams. But many of them are terribly forgettable which is a shame.
November 14, 2025
Inneholder fragmenter av tekster Kafka selv ikke mente holdt mål. Jeg er enig. Noe er veldig bra, men det meste mangler den emosjonelle kraften og stemningen han vanligvis skaper.
«It is in this contradiction, always in a contradiction, that I am able to live»
«It is in this contradiction, always in a contradiction, that I am able to live»
May 21, 2023
I don’t know. There are some gems here. Some things I don’t understand. But it feels important. I will come back to this.
November 20, 2023
This small world is nothing if not devastating to us.
February 18, 2024
strange and odd, read for absurdism class. got told by my professor that based on the writing i'd done, i would enjoy kafka. he was correct :)
May 15, 2023
Deeply intriguing. I still don’t know what to make of some of the stories but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
January 16, 2023
what would the world be like if franz kafka was mentally well enough to finish literally anything he wrote
August 2, 2025
giggled a few times
January 15, 2024
kafkas got bars
August 6, 2025
حتی نتونستم کاملش کنم..
به نظرم جمع کردن نوشتههای نصف و نیمه که هیچی به من خواننده تحویل نمیده بیهوده است!!
به نظرم جمع کردن نوشتههای نصف و نیمه که هیچی به من خواننده تحویل نمیده بیهوده است!!
Read
October 19, 2020At times poetic, at times profound, at times frustrating, these fragments and false starts are extremely interesting and enjoyable. Read a few at a time, set it down, and return later.
January 11, 2021
Magnificent poetic, fragmentary works. Kafka is a strange master; his eye never bores.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews