About the Speaker: Reiner Stach is a German writer and journalist. He is the author of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka, the third and final volume of which, Kafka: The Early Years, has just been published by Princeton University Press. Praise for Reiner Stach’s Kafka Biography: “[This] will surely be the definitive biography of one of the 20th century’s most mysterious artists. Stach’s declared aim is to find out what it felt like to be Kafka, and he succeeds.”—John Banville, Irish Times “This is one of the great literary biographies, to be set up there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, George Painer’s Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel’s Henry James. . . . [A]n eerily immediate portrait of one of literature’s most enduring and enigmatic masters.” —John Banville, New York Review of Books