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Reviews nonfiction books `English Papers: A Teaching Life,' by William H. Pritchard and `Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose,' by Ted Hughes and edited by William Scammell.

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. ''Dearest Max,'' it began. ''My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.'' Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka's request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka's unpublished novels. ''The Trial'' came out in 1925, followed by ''The Castle'' (1926) and ''Amerika'' (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka's papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod's efforts, Kafka's slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature. The contents of Brod's suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford's Bodleian Library, the remainder -- believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts -- stayed in Brod's possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe's death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod's will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters' favor, they will be free to follow Eva's stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don't sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ''America Cooks,'' by the 1940s food writers Cora, Rose and Bob Brown, the trio declared: ''A century ago, when Saratoga Springs was in its heyday as a fashionable resort, specialties from there swept the country, and one of them, Saratoga Chips, will endure as long as there are spuds left to slice.'' They were partly right. The recipe has endured, all right, but Saratoga vanished from the name. We now call them potato chips, and they've reached that late-mannerist ''seasoning'' stage, which has produced such atrocities as sour-cream-and-onion-flavored chips and even ''cool ranch.'' There were many recipes for the chips in The Times, and you can also find plenty elsewhere in cookbooks of the era (most often attributed to George Crum, the Native- and African-American chef at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs). Back then, said Andrew F. Smith, the author of the forthcoming ''Potato: A Global History,'' potato chips were served in restaurants and sold from barrels in general stores and by the 1920s handed out in wax-paper bags. They didn't become a commercial snack food until they were packaged in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new book ''A Road Trip Journal'' (Phaidon, $250) documents a 1973 cross-country drive the photographer Stephen Shore made from New York to the West Coast and back, one of many such trips he took during the 1970s. The volume recreates the scrapbook Shore made at the time: what TV shows he watched (the Watergate hearings, ''All in the Family''), the mileage he clocked, which locations he shot (''Sha-Mar Beauty Salon, Chestnut St.''). He also included every piece of paper he collected -- receipts, parking and movie tickets, and, most important, postcards. ''I found them fascinating because they were not trying to be works of art,'' he says. ''They just show you the main street, the so-and-so motel. I was attracted to that matter-of-factness.'' Ultimately, it was that matter-of-factness that had a big influence on his own pictures; although made with a view camera on a tripod, they are printed to look like everyday snapshots. If the images now seem nostalgic, the book itself forms an unsentimental portrait of the country at that time -- an intersection of architecture and signage, backyards and storefronts, landscape and culture -- that borders on the revelatory. (The most striking feature may be the price of gasoline: $4.36 to fill the tank!) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]