"There is much to be said for [Zilcosky's] new, postcolonial Kafka."-- Times Literary Supplement

"The thrust and execution of the book make the project altogether fascinating. [Zilcosky is] a splendid young talent."
         -- Stanley Corngold, Princeton University

"John Zilcosky multiplies maps, routes, and guides to Kafka in his wonderfully original and astute Kafka's Travels. He is the first critic to take stock of Kafka's fascination with travel and adventure literature and the popular fin de si cle exoticism so gaudily displayed in the Little Green Books series. Zilcosky brilliantly situates Kafka in a popular culture that exhibits traits of perversity, sadism, and masochism. Kafka's peculiar modernism extends popular fictions of empire and their attendant colonialist or imperialist desires, while opening a whole new vista on a writing that turns into an even more dangerous adventure, leading to polymorphous intercourse and endless travels to our darker (in)side."--Jean-Michel Rabat , University of Pennsylvania

"Postcolonial thinking may have made possible the conception of this book, but there's nothing trendy about Zilcosky's probing, magisterial study. In an energetic, jargon-free style he stays firmly inside Kafka's world, reading Kafka's favorite books-popular travel books as well as Goethe and Flaubert-and weaving new relational patterns between Kafka's texts and their late imperial contexts."--James Rolleston, Duke University

"John Zilcosky presents us with an unexpected Kafka: a passionate reader of forgotten texts, an armchair traveler, an ironic exoticist. His penetrating and supple readings explore the fascination, the attraction, and the danger that travel held for Kafka's imagination, producing learned and insightful interpretations of texts such as the America novel and The Trial along the way. With this book Zilcosky joins the ranks of Kafka's most illuminating critics."--David E. Wellbery, LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and the College University of Chicago

"Is there anything left to discover in the crowded field of Kafka studies? John Zilcosky's bold, well-written and -documented study of Kafka's preoccupation with travel and travel writing reverses our picture of the Prague writer as a sedentary bureaucrat. Exploring Kafka's lifelong fascination with the exotic provides new and stunning insights into the imagination of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. Zilcosky is an authoritative guide."--Frank Trommler, Professor of German & Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

"John Zilcosky offers an innovative and utterly compelling interpretation of Kafka as an imaginary (post)colonial traveler. Drawing on scrupulously attentive readings of Kafka's literary and autobiographical texts as well as the most recent work in postcolonial studies, Zilcosky shows how this most sedentary of modernist writers (who never left Europe and had trouble even leaving Prague) traveled the four corners of the globe through his interests in travel literature, children's stories, and contemporary journalism." - Mark M. Anderson, Chair, Dept. of Germanic Languages, Columbia University