Magdaléna Platzová
Magdaléna Platzová is the author of several books, including three novels published in English: Aaron’s Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, The Attempt, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a Czech Book Award finalist, and Life After Kafka, a Magnesia Litera award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic; studied in Washington, DC, and England; received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague; and has taught at New York University’s Gallatin School. She is now based in Lyon, France.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TOP CZECH LITERARY AWARD (2023)
“Franz Kafka is a universe that resists any attempt at interpretation. Magdaléna Platzová’s novel offers a new key to Kafka’s world: we look at it through the tender and sorrowful gaze of the people whose fate had been marked by him personally. An utterly touching book!”
– Agnieszka Holland
Life after Kafka
A novel inspired by the fate of Kafka’s fiancée Felice Bauer
June 2022, 240 pages
RIGHTS SOLD TO: USA (Bellevue Literary Press), France (Agullo), Italy (Voland), Serbia (Treći Trg), Denmark (Forlaget Silkefyret), Germany (Balaena), Croatia (Disput), Egypt (Scheherezade Cultural Initiative), Greece (Eurasia)
Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiancée, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story. The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitler’s Berlin, following her family and members of Kafka’s entourage—including Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schocken—as they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafka’s son approaches Felice’s son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafka’s letters to Felice begins.
While taking the measure of literary fame’s long shadow, Life After Kafka depicts the magic and poison of memories, and what we cling to when all else is lost. Most of all, it illuminates the bravery required to move forward through the shattered remains of one’s world to rebuild life in a new one.
“A book that deserves the attention of Kafka experts as well as those who have never delved deeper into the work of the world’s most famous Prague writer.”
— Česká televize
“Kafka fans and more will delight in this imagined life of his first real love… Combining fact and fiction, [Platzová] illuminates the woman, the era, and Kafka himself.”
– Melanie Fleishman, Center for Fiction Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)
