Kafka Americana

by Lethem, Jonathan; Scholz, Carter

• ISBN13: 9781892284433
• ISBN10: 189228443X
• Edition: Limited
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Subterranean

Summary

In an act of literary appropriation by turns witty, affectionate, and shameless, Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz seize a helpless Franz 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 a 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 professional conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, for a night of musing 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 where Kafka faces, needless to say, fraudulent charges. Taking Modernism's presiding genius for a literary joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Jonathan Lethem's novels, which include Motherless Brooklyn and Girl in Landscape, have been translated into ten languages. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Crank, Exquisite Corpse, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn and Toronto Carter Scholz has been publishing short fiction for over twenty years. He is the coauthor of the novel Palimpsests and the author of the novel Radiance. He lives in California

Table of Contents

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor	p. 3
The Notebooks of Bob K.	p. 16
Receding Horizon	p. 23
The Amount to Carry	p. 51
K for Fake	p. 79
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