The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is thrilled to welcome renowned translator Mark Harman to Harrisburg for a panel discussion and signing on his new work of translation, Selected Stories by Franz Kafka. Harman will be in conversation with local university professors Kerry Wallach and Scott Lerner.
Harman, Wallach, and Lerner will discuss Kafka’s life, work, literary influence, and his enduring legacy. This event is free and open to the public!
To enter the signing line, books must be purchased from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, or you may preorder a copy of the book for pickup/shipment.
A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.
Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose—terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.
Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.
Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.
About the Speakers:
Mark Harman is Professor Emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College. His award-winning translations include Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person and The Castle, as well as Herman Hesse’s Soul of the Age: Selected Letters and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
Kerry Wallach is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She is the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany.
L. Scott Lerner is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French and Italian at Franklin & Marshall College, where he teaches in the Comparative Literature Program, as well as in French, Italian and Judaic Studies. He has published widely on Jewish literature, film and history in relation to majority cultures in modern France and Italy, on representations of loss and mourning, and on Modernist writers, especially Marcel Proust. Most recently, he co-edited with Jonathan Druker The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D'Azeglio to Primo Levi. Occasionally, when teaching the work of Kafka along with that of Proust and Pirendello, he has been thrilled to include a reading and class visit by a world-renowned translator of Kafka's fiction.
