Franz Kafka

Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...

Although certainly located in the Brechtian tradition of epic theatre, with its political resonances and self-referentiality, it is likewise identifiable as theatre of the absurd (as AS points out), with the apparent influences of...

There is a strong flavour of Kafka about this comic parable both of a family and of a state. The royal family of Evarchia (somewhere in contemporary Middle or Eastern Europe) has an authoritarian father...

Her next task was the struggle to secure publication for manuscripts left in her keeping and that of her husband by Walter Benjamin . She also needed work, and became first a literary reviewer and...

After WM finished translating Kafka 's short-story volume The Penal Colony, Stories and Short Pieces, she broke down from exhaustion: my ravaged nervous system began to make itself more felt: I found myself shivering...

WM had conceived and begun work on this novel by 1926, planning to set it in Montrose, her childhood town. She did not start working on it in earnest, however, until 1930...

Anaïs Nin , in The Novel of the Future, pronounced AK 's Asylum Piece to be a classic equal to the work of Kafka .

Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...

Jonathan Lethem revisited Ice in the New York Times fifty years after it appeared, in advance of its anniversary re-issue as a Penguin classic. His notice opened arrestingly: Anna Kavan's Ice is book like the...

Thomas McCarthy wrote in the Cork Literary Review that this volume consolidates what is already an achieved and unique presence in Irish poetry. Her mind is astonishing—within her world Kafka dines comfortably with Vita Sackville-West .

Critic Edward Wagenknecht , believing that the author's creative powers were at their peak at the very end of her life, compares the book's imaginative appeal to that of the German romanticists. He argues...

MB was admired in her own day by others who prided themselves on the popular touch in their writing: Mark Twain , Walter de la Mare , Compton Mackenzie , and Hugh Walpole , who...

During the early part of ICB 's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...

One story, Shell, draws from Kafka 's Metamorphosis, as an overweight single mother grows a shell and becomes a tortoise. Almost all of the stories focus on women, and the most optimistic concern...

Autumn centres around the intergenerational friendship of 32-year-old art-history lecturer Elisabeth Demand and her childhood neighbour, the clever and lively Daniel Gluck, now 101 years old and quietly existing in a care home. Through silent...