The Kraus Project

The Kraus Project
ISBN: 9780007517442
Publication Date: 1 September 2014

A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.

In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments.

While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen's annotations soar over today's cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

About the Author

Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and graduated from Swarthmore College. He has lived in Boston, Spain, New York, Colorado Springs and Philadelphia. His other novels are The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections and Freedom. He is also the author of two collections of non-fiction, How To Be Alone and Farther Away and The Discomfort Zone, a memoir. His fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in the New Yor...