Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

In The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, Jonathan Franzen gives new voice to the great nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean crit­ic Karl Kraus. Fol­lowed by fig­ures such as Franz Kaf­ka and Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Kraus was a Vien­nese satirist who is large­ly for­got­ten today. Until now. Jonathan Franzen’s lat­est work not only includes new trans­la­tions of Kraus’s work, but also his own anno­ta­tions, con­text, and con­tem­po­rary con­nec­tions — an impor­tant addi­tion to your fall read­ing list. The Kraus Project was pub­lished this week by Far­rar, Straus and Giroux:

View past Book Cov­er of the Week” posts here.

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.