cover image Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Jeremy Adler. Overlook Press, $19.95 (164pp) ISBN 978-1-58567-267-7

Biographical Details Love literature but lack leisure? Readers who appreciate the bestselling Penguin Lives series in theory but find the volumes a trifle text-heavy in practice will flock to the new Overlook Illustrated Lives series, in which scholars gloss the lives and times of great 20th-century writers in slim books replete with photographs. Ruth Prigozy's F. Scott Fitzgerald ($19.95 158p ISBN 1-58567-265-3; July), Jeremy Adler's Franz Kafka (164p -267-X) and Mary Ann Caws's Virginia Woolf (136p -264-5) make up the first batch; volumes on Nabokov and Beckett are slated for publication this fall. The reproductions of family portraits, letters, movie posters and paintings are fascinating, and the pared-down bios are clean and highly readable.(July)