Kafka Americana

Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, Kafka Americana has achieved cult status. Norton now brings this reimagination of our labyrinthine world to a wider audience. In an act of literary appropriation, Lethem and Scholz seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written Receding Horizon, Hollywood welcomes Kafka as scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's The Amount to Carry transports the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute to a conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, to muse on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's K for Fake brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial in which Kafka faces fraudulent charges. Taking modernism's presiding genius for a joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived.

Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 09/01/2001
Pages: 108
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.74w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9780393322538

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 01/20/2002 pg. 19
Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/2003 pg. 135

About the Author
Lethem, Jonathan: - Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.Scholz, Carter: - Carter Scholz is the co-author of Palimpsests. His novel Radiance was published in 2002. He lives in California.