CONTENTS
11 Words Are Miserable Miners of Meaning
12 Letter to Ernst Rowohlt
13 Reflections
14 Concerning Parables
15 Children on the Country Road
20 The Spinning Top
21 The Street-Side Window
22 At Night
23 Unhappiness
30 Clothes Make the Man
32 On the Inability to Write
35 I Can Also Laugh
41 The Need to Be Alone
43 So I Sat at My Stately Desk
47 A Writer’s Quandary
52 Give It Up!
53 Eleven Sons
60 Paris Outing
66 The Bridge
68 The Trees
69 The Truth About Sancho Panza
70 The Silence of the Sirens
73 Prometheus
74 Poseidon
76 The Municipal Coat of Arms
79 A Message from the Emperor
81 The Next Village Over
82 First Sorrow
86 The Hunger Artist
102 Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice
129 Investigations of a Dog
189 A Hybrid
192 A Report to an Academy
207 Transformed
287 In the Penal Colony
331 From The Burrow
352 Selected Aphorisms
356 Selected Last Conversation Shreds
359 Notes
365 In the Caves of the Unconscious: K Is for Kafka (An Afterword)
381 The Back of Words (A Translator’s Postscript)
383 Acknowledgments