Before Kafka became an adjective, he was a young insurance official in Prague, negotiating family expectations, complicated attachments and serious ambitions. 

In Kafka: The Decisive Years, Reiner Stach reconstructs the period from 1910 to 1915, when Kafka's writing underwent its extraordinary transformation and the imaginative world of The Judgment, The Metamorphosis and The Trial began to take shape.

Drawing extensively on diaries, correspondence, archival records and contemporary accounts, Stach situates Kafka within the intellectual, political and social life of Central Europe before the First World War. Kafka emerges as considerably more sociable, observant and occasionally funny than his literary reputation might suggest. A substantial work of literary biography that refuses to separate the writer from the historical world he inhabited, while remaining attentive to the peculiar mystery of how an ordinary life produces such extraordinary literature. Translated from German by Shelley Frisch.

Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013. Paperback edition, second printing. Originally published in German in 2002. Illustrated with black-and-white archival photographs. Light surface rubbing and minor corner wear to illustrated wrappers; interior pages appear clean and well preserved.