Book details

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

Author: Franz Kafka; Selected and with an introduction by Joshua Cohen

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

$11.99

About This Book

A new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.

“Being asked to...

Page Count
1
On Sale
02/22/2022

Book Details

A new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.

“Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” —Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka’s preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style.

Cohen’s selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator—God.

Imprint Publisher

Picador

ISBN

9780374722296

About the Creators

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

$11.99