A Hunger Artist & Other Stories; Poems and Songs of Love: Volume 20 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781550718676)

Kafka's writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor, and these two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer, which contains an elegy to Langer's friend and mentor Franz Kafka. Langer and Kafka hailed from the same middle-class, assimilated, Jewish Prague background and shared a mutual interest in Hasidic culture, literature, and Hebrew. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff from the Hebrew brings the fascinating work of Langer -- poems as well as an essay on Kafka -- to the English-reading public for the first time and sheds light on a hitherto unexplored relationship.