Now back in print, Franz Kafka's letters to his fiancé Felice Bauer, written
over the course of their impassioned but doomed relationship, are "some of the
most heartrending 'love letters' ever written" (Morris Dickstein, The New York
Times Book Review).
Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer on August 13, 1912, at the home of his friend Max
Brod. The twenty-five-year-old secretary from Berlin—energetic, down-to-earth,
life-affirming—awakened in him a desire to marry. After weeks of agonizing,
Kafka wrote his first letter to Felice on September 20 and would soon be writing
passionate, self-deprecating, and anxious letters to her almost daily, sometimes
even two or three times a day. Because he