During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature. Read more…

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We are ready to launch our next batch of Simply Charly sites this Fall and we'd like you to give us your feedback on some of the sketches we're considering.

We'd love to hear your opinions. Please add your comments below.

Posted via email from Simply Charly’s Posterous

We are ready to launch our next batch of Simply Charly sites this Fall and we'd like you to give us your feedback on some of the sketches we're considering.

Posted via email from Simply Charly’s Posterous

It's not every day that an international dispute of Kafkaesque proportions shakes up the literary world, but one involving the author himself is doing just that. Read more…

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In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia got the opportunity that most American literature scholars would kill for — to speak with William Faulkner. Read more…

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The heavy musk of Hemingway is in the air this summer: It has something to do with the fact that it's the 110th anniversary of Papa's birth. Scribner, Hemingway's longtime publisher, is reissuing all of his novels; they're also bringing out a mildly interesting new book in August called The Hemingway Patrols about the writer's hunt for U-boats off the coast of Cuba during World War II. (Apparently these patrols were the subject of mockery by Hemingway's then third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn. Given that Hemingway was hunting German submarines in his small wooden fishing boat, the Pilar, perhaps Gellhorn had a point.) The main event of this Hemingway summer is the appearance of what's being called "the restored edition" of what might just be his greatest book, his memoir, A Moveable Feast. Read more…

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Thirty-three years after writing To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee, who hadn't been heard from for decades, wrote to her agent, "I am still alive, although very quiet." Today, Lee is still with us and still very quiet, deep in south Alabama. But in the rest of America, it's about to get a whole lot noisier. Read more…

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Wry and cranky, droll and cantankerous — that’s the Mark Twain we think we know, thanks to reading “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in high school. But in his unexpurgated autobiography, whose first volume is about to be published a century after his death, a very different Twain emerges, more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet. Read more…

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