Library Live at Labyrinth will present biographer Reiner Stach and translator Shelley Frisch in a discussion of Kafka: The Early Years, (Princeton University Press $35) on Thursday, November 10 at 6 p.m.

According to Princeton faculty member and author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka Stanley Corngold, “Kafka: The Early Years completes a masterful trilogy. One feature puts it at light-years’ distance of superiority to anything previously written about Kafka’s early years: Stach had unique access to Max Brod’s notebooks, part of a celebrated cache of documents bearing on his friendship with Kafka. Far more fully than any other Kafka biographer, Stach gives us what Hegel calls ‘the concrete vitality of the full individual.’”

Writing of previous volumes in The Irish Times, John Banville calls it “the definitive biography of one of the 20th century’s most mysterious artists. Stach’s declared aim is to find out what it felt like to be Kafka, and he succeeds.”

Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka’s collected works before embarking on his three-volume biography of the writer. The other volumes are Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight. Shelley Frisch’s translations of those volumes were awarded the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Her many other translations from the German include Karin Wieland’s Dietrich & Riefenstahl, a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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