Letters to Milena

Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka are among the most extraordinary love letters in literary history — an extended, intense, and finally heartbreaking correspondence between Kafka and the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, whom he met in 1919. Through these letters, Kafka reveals himself with a nakedness rare in his published work: his anxieties, his longing, his fear of intimacy, his obsessive self-analysis, and the genuine depth of his feeling for Milena. As literature, the letters are as powerful as his fiction; as biography, they illuminate the inner life of one of the twentieth century’s most essential writers. Published by Vintage, this edition includes editorial apparatus that places the correspondence in its full historical and personal context. Essential for Kafka devotees and anyone interested in the relationship between an artist’s life and their art.