Description

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What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. 

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

About the Author

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With contributions from: Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross, and Ali Smith. 

The authors in this book have won prizes including The Women's Prize for Fiction, the American Book Award, an Academy Award, multiple BAFTAs and the Writers Guild of America Award; and they have been shortlisted for prizes including the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. From countries including China, the USA, Ireland and the UK, and living now in cities around the globe from Prague to New York City, the authors represent how far-reaching Kafka's influence is across the world.

Praise For…

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The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring

"A boon for Kafkaheads everywhere." —John H. Maher, The Millions

“Franz Kafka died in June 1924, at the age of forty, but his fables of absurd transformation, macabre punishments, and human venality are alive and well . . . [The authors] offer narratives of baffling circumscriptions, illnesses, miscommunications, and technologies. But the stories also make space for potentiality, with characters witnessing change or glimpsing future possibilities—putting Kafka’s turn-of-the-century disillusionment into conversation with our own.” —Poets & Writers