A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
Ten Kafkaesque Stories
Tommy Orange & Ali Smith & Naomi Alderman & Elif Batuman & Helen Oyeyemi
Book Description
What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.
Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a prophet and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment.
From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.
Praise For This Book
The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring“A Kafkaesque frisson can be felt in [this] wide-ranging Catapult anthology.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Surreal, dark, often hilarious, and not unworthy of a volume dedicated to the memory of Franz Kafka." —Michael Washburn, National Review
"A Cage Went in Search of a Bird meets me in this insatiable desire for the Kafkaesque. The cage is the page that obliges his paradoxical ghosts." —Alina Ştefănescu, Electric Literature
"The writing in this collection is deft, self-referential, horrifying, and funny. In one story, the protagonist asks ‘just who, and what, is a museum for? And [are] we really ready to have this conversation?’ Here readers can ask, who is Kafka for? A Cage Went in Search of a Bird is ready to have that very conversation.” —Dominic Charles Howarth, Shelf Awareness
"Mind-bending and consistently enjoyable . . . A Cage Went in Search of a Bird is a roller coaster ride that will delight the adventuresome reader . . . It’s easy to imagine Kafka paging through these varied and deeply imagined tales and nodding in admiration." —Harvey Freedenberg, BookPage
"Marking the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, the 10 absurd tales in this multiauthored collection aspire to be Kafkaesque." —Booklist
"Inspired . . . These stories will do the trick for the Kafka curious and diehard fans alike.” —Publishers Weekly
"A boon for Kafkaheads everywhere." —John H. Maher, The Millions
“Franz Kafka died in June 1924, at the age of forty, but his fables of absurd transformation, macabre punishments, and human venality are alive and well . . . [The authors] offer narratives of baffling circumscriptions, illnesses, miscommunications, and technologies. But the stories also make space for potentiality, with characters witnessing change or glimpsing future possibilities—putting Kafka’s turn-of-the-century disillusionment into conversation with our own.” —Poets & Writers
