Franz Kafka

“Franz Kafka’s drawings are neither ‘scribblings’ (as he called them) nor illustrations meant as mere accompaniments to text. . . . Kafka saw pictures and words as not complementary but independent, even irresolvable. The figures he drew stand alone as stories in themselves.”—Lauren Christensen, New York Times Book Review

“[Kafka] was serious about the visual as well as the verbal. . . . His figures are grotesques, sometimes comical, sometimes cruel, their bodies, often drawn in dark black ink, like Rorschach blots come to life.”—Max Norman, Wall Street Journal

“The more you move through this book, the more drawing and writing seem to exist for Kafka on a single and intricate plane, and it begins to change all the usual perspectives.”—Adam Thirlwell, Times Literary Supplement

“A sensational new book [that] reveals these hitherto hidden artworks for the first time. . . . This valuable volume allows us to see how, for Kafka, word and image walk arm in arm.”—Benjamin Balint, Jewish Review of Books

“A most welcome thunderbolt . . . [that] promises to open new vistas in our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most luminously complex, enigmatic, and elusive minds.”—Alessandro Cassin, Printed Matter

“Intriguing and sincere insights into [Kafka’s] imagination . . . disturbing and amusing us with flashes of menace and mischief.”—Ben Sixsmith, Washington Examiner

“This publication is the culmination of a remarkable event—the discovery in 2019 of hundreds of previously unknown drawings by Franz Kafka. . . . Essential.”—W. S. Bradley, Choice


“The uncanny animatedness, that which strikes us in Kafka’s prose even before we are enraptured by its depths, lives everywhere in the evidence of his hand. It lives in his cursive script, in these faces and bodies and windswept horses, in these self-portraits we encounter having somehow always known he was there, staring into us, waiting to be seen.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

“An important and original book. Informative and perceptive, it illuminates a side of Kafka that has hitherto scarcely been known.”—Ritchie Robertson, author of Kafka: A Very Short Introduction

“Kafka, this absorbing book shows, was both artist and art-lover: inspired by Asian art, he explored line in defiance of gravity, drawing as a counterpoint to script. An intriguing volume, with Butler’s essay as the highlight.”—Katie Trumpener, Yale University