Life After Kafka

(Paperback)

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A novel of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafkas first fiance, and the story behind Letters to Felice

Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiance, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story. The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitlers Berlin, following her family and members of Kafkas entourageincluding Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schockenas they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafkas son approaches Felices son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafkas letters to Felice begins.

While taking the measure of literary fames long shadow, Life After Kafka depicts the magic and poison of memories, and what we cling to when all else is lost. Most of all, it illuminates the bravery required to move forward through the shattered remains of one world to rebuild life in a new one.

Reviews

Life After Kafka is not just a fictional quest to find out who Kafkas fiance, Felice Bauer, was and what kind of life she led after their five-year correspondence ended. In it, life after Kafka is the existential situation into which a community of Prague-based, Jewish intellectuals were thrown . . . capturing the living conditions and possibilities of the refugees after the loss of their homes and relationships, after the shattering of the world whose ruins each of them took with them in a few suitcases. Magnesia Litera jury citation

This elegantly narrated novel, full of fascinations, paints an impassioned and poignant portrait of Felice Bauer and other exiles connected to Franz Kafka and charts a compelling cartography of their now vanished world. Benjamin Balint, author of Kafkas Last Trial and Bruno Schulz

With Life After Kafka, Magdalna Platzov has evoked a cosmopolitan storm of postWorld War II emotion, an obsessive level of research, and a unique documentary-style attention that adds not only to the mystery of Franz Kafka, but to the scholarship of Kafka as well. This original, sophisticated novel bewitches and inspires. Joanna Hershon, author of The Outside of August and St. Ivo

Life After Kafka is a thrilling detective story about one of literatures most celebrated names, a haunting family saga about preserving our legacy during the darkest turns of history, and a thought-provoking exploration of the rippling impact of famous artists on the people in their lives. Platzovs masterful merging of fact and fiction, in Alex Zuckers artful and inspired translation, carries us across decades and continents to prove that our connections can be abandoned and yet unbroken, and that even the briefest encountersin love and in artcan shape us forever. Jaroslav Kalfa, author of Spaceman of Bohemia and A Brief History of Living Forever

Author Bio

Magdalna Platzov is the author of several books, including three novels published in English: Aarons Leap, a Lidov Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, The Attempt, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a Czech Book Award finalist, and Life After Kafka, a Magnesia Litera award finalist (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in August 2024). Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzov grew up in the Czech Republic; studied in Washington, DC, and England; received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague; and has taught at New York Universitys Gallatin School. She is now based in Lyon, France.