He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka (riverrun editions)
'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 preface 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 favourites 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 emphasises the stately structure of utterly coherent logic, within an utterly incoherent 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. Who is God.
Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. He ranks among the twentieth-century's most acclaimed writers. His works evoke anxiety, alienation and uncertainty in a world that is largely unfeeling and unfamiliar. He bequeathed his main body of work to long-time friend Max Brod, asking for it to be burned unread. Brod disobeyed Kafka's, whose work is now considered among the most original in Western literature.
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Moving Kings, Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, n+1, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and others. In 2017 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.