He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka
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“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.
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Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of the best-known writers in the German language. He is especially famous for The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, as well as his many shorter works. He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
Joshua Cohen is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Book of Numbers and Moving Kings; the short-story collection Four New Messages; and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. In 2017 Cohen was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
