Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vast landscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the "golden land." Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic and visionary tale of America "as a place no one has yet seen, in a historical period that can't be identified," writes E. L. Doctorow in his new foreword. "Kafka made his first novel from his own mind's mythic elements," Doctorow explains, "and the research data that caught his eye were bent like light rays in a field of gravity."