For the first time, the complete collection of Kafka's surviving letters is being published in Spanish.

Here, "letters" refers to all the missives Kafka wrote throughout his life, whether postcards, telegrams, or letters proper, including official, commercial, or professional correspondence. Nearly 150 of the letters collected in this volume have never been translated before.

But perhaps even more remarkable than this novelty is that all the letters are presented in a new translation based on the text and chronological sequence established by Hans-Gerd Koch's rigorous German critical edition.

The years covered by the letters collected here span from Kafka's adolescence to his early adulthood. The first letter was written when Kafka had just turned seventeen; the last, when he was thirty-one, when he was resolved to embark on a life independent of his family, whether with a partner or alone.

Until the end of 1912, the correspondents in these letters were primarily Kafka's family members, childhood and teenage friends—most notably Max Brod—his first girlfriend, his superiors at work, and his first publishers. But on September 20 of that year, Kafka wrote for the first time to Felice Bauer, whom he had met shortly before, and the flow of his correspondence intensified rapidly, sometimes at a rate of one letter a day, occasionally two, focusing almost exclusively on the woman who would soon become his fiancée. Before, during, and after the turbulent correspondence with his Berlin girlfriend, however, a sequential reading of all the letters reveals the "polyphony" of Kafka's voices, the wide range of his personality, the multiplicity of his "tones," which sometimes alternated with surprising simultaneity. And not only that: it also allows one to realize how all his psychological mechanisms obey a fundamental obsession: finding the moment to start writing.