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“... ever intolerable. As Jorge Luis Borges puts it, in his introduction to the new translation by J.A. Underwood of the stories published in Kafka’s lifetime: ‘His stories ... presuppose a religious conscience, specifically a Jewish conscience ...’ He ‘saw his work as an act of faith, and he did not want it to discourage other men.’ However, in ...”

“... renders the word as ‘hopeless’. Willa and Edwin Muir have ‘dismal and cheerless’, J.A. Underwood has ‘bleak’. I also rather like ‘desolate’ myself, but all of these words point in the right direction. Trostlos can also be used of a dreary landscape, and in this sense calls up another curious logical riddle in The Castle, one of the most ...”

“... I had just turned 22 when the connection between having sex and safely storing nuclear waste was first made clear to me. I was writing a book about the American nuclear establishment, and one day found myself sitting across a conference table from a top executive at Combustion-Engineering, a large multinational corporation that sold nuclear reactors ...”

“... explanation is worth having. Others translators try for direct alternatives: ‘charging’ (J.A. Underwood, in Mass Psychology and Other Writings); ‘investment’ (Helena Ragg-Kirkby, in An Outline of Psychoanalysis); ‘investment’ and ‘charge’ (Shaun Whiteside, in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia). Similar worries arise with the trio we know as ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”