Letters to Felice is a book collecting some of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

's letters to Felice Bauer from 1912 to 1917. Schocken Books

Schocken Books

Schocken Books is a publishing company that was established in Berlin with a publishing office in Prague in 1931 by the Schocken Department Store owner Salman Schocken. It published the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and S. Y...

 acquired these letters from Felice Bauer in 1955, in addition to roughly half of Kafka's letters to Grete Bloch, Bauer's friend. Additional letters to Bloch were acquired at a later date. During the period of the correspondence Kafka and Bauer were engaged twice, and Kafka produced some of his most famous works, including The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world...

, In the Penal Colony

In the Penal Colony

"In the Penal Colony" is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919....

 and his first attempts at writing The Trial

The Trial

The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader.Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never...

.

Originally published in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 in 1967 as Briefe an Felice, the collection was first published in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by Schocken Books in 1973. It was translated by James Stern

James Stern

James Stern Anglo-Irish writer of short stories and non-fiction.The son of a British cavalry officer of Jewish descent and an Anglo-Irish Protestant mother, Stern was born in County Meath, Ireland. After working in Southern Rhodesia as a young man, he worked for his family's bank in London and...

 and Elisabeth Duckworth.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

n novelist Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...

wrote about the correspondence in Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice. Through a reading of the letters along with sections of The Trial Canetti examined Kafka's struggle between a comfortable middle-class life and individual isolation.