Kafka Americana

Description

"In an act of literary appropriation by turns witty, affectionate, and shameless, Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz seize a helpless Franz Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as a scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a professional conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, for a night of musing on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial where Kafka faces, needless to say, fraudulent charges. Taking Modernism's presiding genius for a literary joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

BLUMFELD, AN ELDERLY BACHELOR, arrived home from work each weekday at six.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Kafka Americana: FictionW. W. Norton & Company2001-09-01
• Kafka AmericanaHardcoverSubterranean Press1999-11-01
• Kafka AmericanaHardcoverSubterranean Press1999-11-01
• Kafka AmericanaW. W. Norton & Company2001-09-01