It is common to say of biography that it sends you back to the work. Stach’s book does this in spades, but, importantly for English readers, it also presents new aspects of the work in Shelley Frisch’s superb and lucid translations. Many English admirers of Kafka are likely to have read him in dated and occasionally problematic Thirties versions by Willa and Edwin Muir. In her afterword to this book, however, Frisch writes that she has retranslated all the quoted excerpts herself since no standard Kafka edition exists in English. If this constitutes a job application, she would be an excellent candidate for the post. Between them, she and Stach have produced a superbly fresh imaginative guide to the strange, clear, metaphor-free world of Kafka’s prose: a prose which, just like the court in The Trial, “wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”