In no other work doesFranz Kafkareveal himself as inLetters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into a passionate but doomed epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator,Milena Jesenska, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For the thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping."The voice of Kafka in Letters to Milena is more personal, more pure, and more painful than in his fiction: a testimony to human existence and to our eternal wait for the impossible. A marvellous new edition of a classic text."—Jan Kott“An extraordinary document—touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, heartbreaking, and infinitely convoluted... It reveals him most clearly (which is relative, and Kafka remains mystifying enough), and it is — aside from the beauty of the letters themselves — the most significant key we have for a reading of the author’s novels and short stories.”—The New York TimesFRANZ KAFKAwas born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. Hepublished only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.