A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

by Tommy Orange (Contribution by), Ali Smith (Contribution by), Naomi Alderman (Contribution by), Elif Batuman (Contribution by), Helen Oyeyemi (Contribution by)

Overview

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 profit 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646222636
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	118,986
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

With contributions from: Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross, and Ali Smith.

The authors in this book have won prizes including The Women's Prize for Fiction, the American Book Award, an Academy Award, multiple BAFTAs and the Writers Guild of America Award; and they have been shortlisted for prizes including the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. From countries including China, the USA, Ireland and the UK, and living now in cities around the globe from Prague to New York City, the authors represent how far-reaching Kafka's influence is across the world.

Editorial Reviews

04/29/2024

This inspired anthology demonstrates the enduring influence of Franz Kafka’s fatalistic worldview and mordant humor. In the introduction, Becca Rothfeld muses on Kafka’s “mystifying” aphorisms and recurring theme of imprisonment, suggesting that “we might begin to sympathize with the cage looking for a bird, for we, too, are desperate to catch the fugitive flutter of comprehension.” Standout entries include “The Board,” Elif Batuman’s amusing tale of a woman who goes through bureaucratic hoops to purchase a basement apartment, and Joshua Cohen’s “Return to the Museum,” written from the perspective of a Neanderthal on display at a natural history museum as it reopens after a pandemic. Lingering pandemic fears also pop up in Tommy Orange’s “The Hurt” and Helen Oyeyemi’s “Hygiene,” though both fail to stick their respective landings. More successful is Yiyun Li’s “Apostrophe’s Dream,” which takes the form of a play staged by various punctuation marks about the gradual abandonment of their proper usage. Charlie Kaufman’s metafictional closer is equally clever, unspooling the story of an author who, after his book launch, learns he inadvertently copied Kafka’s language and sees his life upended. These stories will do the trick for the Kafka curious and diehard fans alike. (June)

Publishers Weekly

The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of Spring

"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

From the Publisher