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The Latest Breaking News from Gregor Samsa

Kafka at 100: Rawi Hage’s brilliant ‘Cockroach’ invited some comparison to ‘The Metamorphosis’

“How to exist and not to belong?” asks the unnamed protagonist and narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel, Cockroach.

The Conversation

Kafka 100: a parade of men with no appetite from a writer consumed by thoughts of nourishment

There is a rather potent image of failure which recurs in the short stories and novels of Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who died of tuberculosis 100 years ago. The image is of a young man brimming with self-assurance who, without warning, is assailed by some irreproachable authority. He protests,…

The Conversation

A century after his death, Kafka still sums up our surreal world

A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine

The Guardian - UK

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Can’t get you out of my head: why pop culture is still under Kafka’s spell

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

The Guardian - UK

Kafka 100: Stanley Kubrick’s films are littered with references to the writer’s work

I began teaching Stanley Kubrick in 2007 shortly after I moved to Bangor University. In 2012, I embarked on a research project exploring what I called Kubrick’s ethics, ethnicity and archives. It was during that research, which was published as Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual in 2018, that I…

The Conversation

Franz Kafka’s dour image hid a much lighter side, a new exhibition reveals

Artefacts on display in Oxford next month show the ‘humorous insights’ of a writer best known for his nightmarish stories

The Guardian - UK

Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith review: it's a bug's life in Lemn Sissay's meandering take on Kafka

The production fosters a potent sense of unease, but the mood is relentless and unvarying

Evening Standard

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‘This family is being devoured’: Lemn Sissay on why Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a tale for our times

The poet has teamed up with Frantic Assembly to bring the novella, about a man who turns into an insect, to the stage. He explains why this story of family meltdown is all about modern life

The Guardian - UK

The science behind the brain-altering impact of your first pregnancy

Having given birth, Lucy Jones dug deep into the science of why she felt like a totally different person… and had her mind blown by what she discovered

Evening Standard

Writer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: ‘The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does’

The writer and professor of English literature on being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the more unexpected ways his life has been transformed

The Guardian - UK

TikTok's addictive anti-aesthetic has already conquered culture

If Franz Kafka were to reconceive "The Metamorphosis" for our era, he might decide to ditch the novella in favor of a series of surreal TikToks — Gregor Samsa as eyes and mouth green-screened onto a picture of a roach jacked from the web.

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