Kafka Americana

Dustjacket art by Svetana.

Franz Kafka: by day, a mild-mannered insurance executive; by night a seminal Twentieth Century fabulist. Author of The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, Amerika.

Franz Kafka: Czech refugee, American screenwriter, painter of sad-eyed waifs, reclusive superhero with an identity problem. Associate of Frank Capra, Orson Welles, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, Gary Cooper, Rod Serling, and Roberto Begnini.

Franz Kafka: victim of an audacious, witty, hermetic, affectionate and shameless literary appropriation and reimagination by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz.

These five stories project Kafka into a modern America he never lived to see, but might have invented -- a world of material wealth and spiritual vapidity, filled with the detritus of postwar culture: old comic books, Hollywood movies, and tacky paintings of crying children.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of five novels, including Girl in Landscape and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as a collection of stories. He lives in New York City.

Carter Scholz is the author (with Glenn Harcourt) of Palimpsests and of numerous short stories. He lives in Berkeley, California.