"This New Directions release of Investigations of a Dog provides an opportunity to reconsider many of Kafka’s greatest stories in a new book, with beautiful cover design, and to reexamine how a brilliant mind performed under spiritually backbreaking circumstances."
Los Angeles Review of Books "Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at ... Read moreonce ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’"
New Republic "Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended. He has cut through literary pretension to seek out the heart of Kafka’s work—the very ‘particles’ of his writing, as they have been called. His translation shows Kafka as a modern writer whose work was beyond that of anything written at that time. Mr. Hofmann, in his many excellent translations from the German, always makes brave choices."
Lee Rourke - The Guardian "Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann."
The New York Times Book Review "Hofmann and Kafka...provide one with rich intellectual companionship."
Franz Kafka - The Times Literary Supplement "Kafka spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament."
John Updike "Of course I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable people do."
Jorge Luis Borges Show Less