Imagining Franz Kafka as my personal authorial adversary is a weird combination of self-effacement and self-aggrandizement. It’s not that I think he’d have anything against me personally, especially if that one biographer was right and he was into fat chicks.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Chicago style now mandates no capital s for southern in reference to the lower portion of the United States. I know, it looks wrong to me too. The South is still capped, fortunately.
I like people who have obvious icons or totems I can draw to make it clear who they are. Walter always carries an ice pick, and Flannery O’Connor here can always be on crutches. So far Poe has been waving[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
If you want me, I’ll be here in this box.
I think there’s often an elephant in the room in discussions of Kafka, which is the fact that we may like his work more than we otherwise would because he has this personal mystique, he’s this platonic ideal of what[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I don’t know how much sense it makes outside my head that I should be in a large box because my novel needs work. It makes perfect sense to me. Much as it makes perfect sense that Kafka, if left[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The only Czech I ever knew personally was my uncle Yaacov, who hadn’t lived in Czechoslovakia (which is still what it was when he was born there) since he was a teenager, and who never, as far as I can[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Poor Max, always having to deal with these unreasonable demands.
Ask the Internet to show you pictures of Kafka’s grave and you’ll get six Kafkas for the price of one: Franz and his parents Julie and Hermann, who survived him, are all stacked in the same plot, much as Franz[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Franz Kafka looked nothing like his father Hermann, a fleshy, forceful businessman. In looks as in personality he favored his mother’s family, though Julie Kafka’s features were not quite as sharp, not to say rodenty, as her son’s, nor did[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Click to buy my illustrated version of the book of Jonah! I’m super proud of it.