Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz and similar items

Format: Hardcover; Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; ISBN: 9780385350341; Release Date: 2014; List Price: $24.95; Length: 209 pages; Edition: 1; Other: Deckle-edged pages. Condition: Very Good. Withdrawn library copy with usual labels and stamps. Cover is still in overall great shape, binding is strong, and pages are otherwise unmarked. Same cover design as that shown here. Synopsis: From one of our most thought-provoking and admired writers, a brilliant, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking group of stories based on a circle of real people who are held together by love of their friend Franz Kafka. The sequence opens with Max Brod, Kafka?s friend and literary executor, telling us about Kafka and Dora Diamant, their love growing stronger even as Kafka is dying of tuberculosis. Kafka talks with Brod about forgiving the Angel of Death, but Brod wonders if Franz is really talking about Brod?s forgiving Kafka for the predicament he?s put him in, having instructed Max to prove his love for Franz by burning the work Brod most admires: Franz?s unpublished stories. Next there is a brief interlude--perhaps a lost Kafka story, or is it a story about a lost Kafka story which is perhaps itself masquerading as one of the things that in anger Brod neither burned nor published? The story that follows tells of Dora?s marriage to the militant German Communist Lusk Lask and his attempt to break the hold of the angelic Kafka on his wife?s imagination by giving her a daughter. We watch this family in its move to the Soviet Union to escape Hitler, and as Dora and her daughter flee the Soviet Union to escape Stalin, leave Lusk behind in the Gulag. Later when Lusk tries to connect with his daughter again, the Angel Kafka seems once again to stand in his way, a force in his daughter?s life that seemingly destroys as it sustains. In the last story we meet Milena Jasenska, another of Kafka?s lovers, and Eva, the woman who, after surviving Stalin?s camps, meets Milena in a Nazi concentration camp and is reborn in this hell through her love for her, though perhaps trapped there in memory because of that love as well. By the end, these moving love stories with Kafka as their presiding ghost have told the calamitous story of Europe in the Century of the Camps. Imbued with a gravitas and dark irony that recall Kafka?s own work, these stories nonetheless also bear the singular imaginary stamp and the keen psychological and emotional insight that have marked all of Jay Cantor?s fiction. Priority Mail shipping for this item costs $7.00 at the request of the buyer. Otherwise, the shipping rate given here applies to orders shipped via Media Mail within the U.S. only. Orders consisting of multiple purchases packaged together ship by any of these delivery methods at a discounted rate, usually for only $1.00 per additional item plus the shipping fee for the first item (determined to be the one with the highest delivery charge). International buyers: please contact us with your destination country for applicable base shipping rates. Multiple purchases that are packaged together save shipping costs for you, too! Payment is expected within two weeks of placing your order for the first item within a shipment. Paypal is preferred, but money orders and checks (either personal or cashier's) are also accepted. Orders typically ship within 48 hours of PROCESSED payment, excluding weekends and holidays. Inquiries from all shoppers are responded to promptly and courteously. Buyers are encouraged to ask questions prior to placing orders, as all sales are final unless the product you receive differs significantly from that which was advertised here in terms of either the product itself or its promised condition. In other words, "buyer's remorse" does not qualify for a refund. In other words, ?buyer?s remorse? does not qualify for a refund. Exceptions are made only in the event that a buyer is willing to return at his or her own expense an unopened, BRAND NEW item for a refund of the original purchase price only. No original shipping costs will be refunded, unless we are at fault for sending you the wrong item or misrepresenting the product and/or its condition. This hasn?t happened yet, but if it does: you are guaranteed a refund of the purchase price, the original shipping fee, PLUS the cost to ship the item back to us. In addition, we promise that no retaliatory feedback will be left for negative comments received on such transactions. We stand behind our service, and accept responsibility for any mistakes made. Thank you for looking!