Franz Kafka
Story Stream
Urgent Messages from Eternity January 31, 2025
If Franz Kafka, whose arresting appearance we know so well from photographs, had looked like Ernest Hemingway or Homer Simpson or Boris Johnson—almost anybody other than Franz Kafka—the figure of a hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, self-en...
Olga Tokarczuk’s New Rules for Realism January 16, 2025
In his 1956 study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács distinguished between two literary traditions. Comparing the works of Thomas Mann, whom he considers a realist writer, with the works of F...
The New Semantics of the Kafkaesque January 15, 2025
In conversation with a friend who is well versed in neologism, the discussion often returns to Franz Kafka. Trace the roots of any word back far enough and you’ll find historical context largely removed from contemporary meaning, but Franz Kafka and ...
Streaming Kafka June 10, 2024
One hundred years ago this week, Franz Kafka lay on his deathbed, coughing up blood. By his side was his last, most devoted girlfriend, Dora Diamant, with whom he had fantasized about emigrating to Palestine. Now he was too feeble to crawl out of bed...
The Vacuous Politics of Franz Kafka June 10, 2024
We have been lied to about Kafka. Our received image is that of a morose manic depressive, a gloomy and sickly bundle of nerves hacking away at his craft in isolation, like some Lana del Rey avant la lettre. But as shown by his diaries, published afr...
A Kafkaesque Centenary June 04, 2024
Max Brod has a lot to answer for. As the closest thing Franz Kafka had to a best friend, and more pertinently also his literary executor, Brod was given clear instructions that he was to destroy all Kafka’s unpublished work following his death, which...
The Serene Steamroller May 13, 2024
Franz Kafka was a skinny fellow; he claimed he was the thinnest person he knew. As a young man, he deliberately developed a facial tic. He sometimes felt he didn’t really exist, or if he did, only in the unreality of literature. He enjoyed reading hi...
Cooking with Franz Kafka February 23, 2024
In Franz Kafka’s first published story, “Description of a Struggle,” the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that “did not taste very good,” when a man walks up to him. The man is described as ...
