In the summer of 2011 I asked for some help in compiling a bibliography of secondary Kafka literature that is worth reading. There is no shortage of academic monographs, essay collections and handbooks offering theories on Kafka’s small oeuvre.
It should go without saying that the first stop on the Kafka journey must be the short stories and the three incomplete novels. Moving on to the letters and diaries you quickly reach the end of Kafka material available. The list below is carefully chosen and offers up the most enlightening secondary works:
- Kafka: The Decisive Years – Reiner Stach
- The I Without a Self (The Dyer’s Hand) – W. H. Auden
- Lambent Traces: Kafka – Stanley Corngold
- A Bird Was In The Room (Writing and the Body) – Gabriel Josipovici
- Kafka’s Children (Singer on the Shore) – Gabriel Josipovici
- Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice – Elias Canetti
- The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta (Testaments Betrayed) – Milan Kundera
- Reading Kafka and Kafka & Literature (The Work of Fire) – Maurice Blanchot
- Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form - Stanley Corngold
- Kafka: An Art for the Wilderness (The Lessons of Modernism) - Gabriel Josipovici
- Notes on Kafka (Prisms) – Adorno
- K. - Roberto Calasso
- Conversations With Kafka – Gustav Janouch
- Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays – Ronald Gray, ed.
- The Metamorphosis (Lectures on Literature) – Vladimir Nabokov
- Kafka, Rilke and Rumpelstiltskin (Speak, Silence) – Idris Parry
- Kafka and the Work’s Demand (The Space of Literature) – Maurice Blanchot
- Franz Kafka and Some Reflections on Kafka (Illuminations) -Walter Benjamin
Excluded from this list because I consider them inferior are Brod’s biography (interesting but unreliable), Pietro Citati’s hagiography and Deleuze and Guattari’s showiness.
I will update this list if I come across worthy new additions of if you let me know of anything I have missed.
[21 Aug: Added a second Blanchot, Gray, Parry and Nabokov; deleted Pawel's biography due to speculation and inaccuracies.]
