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Letters to Milena
- Author
- Franz Kafka
- Publisher
- Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish Date
- 3 February 2026
- Run Time
- 9 hours 39 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.
“Extraordinary … touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking. … The most significant key we have for a reading of the author’s novels and short stories.”—The New York Times
In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka’s Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka’s complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was “a living fire, such as I have never seen.” It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
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Details
- Author
- Franz Kafka
- Narrator
- Edoardo Ballerini, Alyssa Bresnahan
- Duration
- 9 hours 39 minutes
- Release Date
- 3 February 2026
- ISBN
- 9798899732874
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Recorded Books, Inc.
- Genre
- Diaries, letters and journals, Biography: writers, Literature: history and criticism
Synopsis
The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.  “Extraordinary … touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking. … The most significant key we have for a reading of the author’s novels and short stories.”—The New York Times In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka’s Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka’s complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was “a living fire, such as I have never seen.” It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
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