320 pages | Paperback

A new selection of Kafkas shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Joshua Cohen.

Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone whos standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point. Joshua Cohen, from his foreword toHe: 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 favourites likeThe Bucket Rider,ThePenal Colony, andThe Burrow. Here we see Kafkas preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style.

Cohens selection emphasises 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 universes only reliable narratorGod.