k

"Harman offers a compromise between Kafka’s intended title and Brod’s more familiar one by calling his version Amerika: The Missing Person. And he follows previous English editions by retaining the German spelling of America, with a 'k.' This lends the name, in American eyes, a more ominous and alien quality than it would have for the German reader. That 'k' is hard to resist, however, and not just because readers have come to expect it. No writer has ever annexed a single letter the way Kafka did with 'k.' Between the two in his own last name, Joseph K. of 'The Trial' and K. of 'The Castle,' the letter seems imbued with his own angular essence."

- "America, 'Amerika'" by Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Books Review