Hardcover Trade Edition
6 x 9 inches.
152 pages.
95 images.
ISBN: 0226986713
List Price: $30.00
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For international orders,
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With Kafka Goes to the Movies, Hanns Zischler draws on years of detective work to provide the first account of Kafka’s moviegoing life. This innovative history of early cinema offers an absorbing look at a witty, passionate, and indulgently curious writer, one who discovered and used the cinema as a place of enjoyment and escape, as a medium for the ambivalent encounter with modern life, and as a filter for the world around him.

Hanns Zischler, born in 1947 in Nuremburg, is an actor and publicist. He has directed TV movies and live theater and has appeared in films by Chabrol, Godard, and Wim Wenders. He is a cofounder of Merve and Alpheus Publishers. His most recent publications are Day Trips (1993) and You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover (1995). He has lived in Berlin since 1968.

A Winterhouse Book. Published by the University of Chicago Press.

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A mad and beautiful project, which sends the reader spinning into one of the great artistic minds of the last century. Paul Auster

Zischler's detective work is impressive, bringing to light a wealth of movie posters, reviews, and stills, which he juxtaposes with Kafka's journals and letters... His notion that movies were a place where Kafka could indulge his "wish for unselfconscious loneliness" is appealing, as is the thought of the writer taking a well-earned break from his nightmare imaginings. The New Yorker, January 13, 2003

Kafka Goes to the Movies is a charmingly eccentric little work of obsession. If it makes no grand statements about Kafka as an author, it offers illuminating details about Kafka as a man of his time, trying to escape through entertainment and trying to move from a 19th- to a 20th-century mode of seeing. New York Times Book Review, December 22, 2002

This valuable little book gives us a Kafka firmly situated in his time and deepens the mystery of his remarkable work. Bookforum, Winter 2002

Watching Kafka emerge...a portrait takes shape not of a cinephile but of an intelligence, an oddly determined sensibility, emerging from the conventions and distractions of ordinary literary life. Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 10, 2002

Kafka Goes to the Movies brings an altogether fresh perspective to the life of Kafka, always an absorbing subject, and offers a fine look at a fascinating era of cinematic history. Of particular interest to scholars and to humanities and film collections. Library Journal, October 15, 2002

Zischler has produced a book to read, left through, linger over, gaze at, and watch. It surely would have enchanted Kafka himself. Badische Zeitung

Zischler jump-cuts from commentary to diaries to postcards and letters. The analytic connections made by Zischler are ambitious. Or, as novelist Paul Auster notes in the blurb, brilliantly mad. Eye Magazine, Summer 2003

Taking as his starting point an evaluation of every conceivable reference to film in Kafka's letters, diaries and other writing, he traces every cinema that Kafka visited, whether at home in Prague or on vacation in Paris and Verona, and pursues each surviving reel or clip of every movie Kafka ever saw. His book is packed with discoveries, including reproductions of stills, placards, kiosks and cinemas, wonderfully evoking the early days of the new medium, and the world as Kafka saw it. Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003

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