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

Smith, Ali; Orange, Tommy; Alderman, Naomi; Oyeyemi, Helen; Ridgway, Keith; Li, Yiyun; Kaufman, Charlie; Batuman, Elif; Ross, Leone; Cohen, Joshua

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0349146403 ISBN 13: 9780349146409

Publisher: Abacus, 2024

Synopsis

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death

*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European*

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt 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 the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

About this title

About the Author

Ali Smith was born in Inverness and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of three collections of stories and three novels. Hotel World was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2001 and her latest novel, The Accidental, won the 2006 Whitbread Novel Award. Ali reviews regularly for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.

From the Back Cover

We trust the machines for most things these days. We need enough to eat. We tell the machines. The machines make this happen. We wish for vast areas of wilderness to explore. The machines cause this to occur. The machines make other machines. Those make yet further machines. Somehow they make sure the world is beautiful, clean, filled with natural life.

We live, you must understand, in Paradise.

From the Inside Flap

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt 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 the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

Edition details

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349146403
• ISBN 13: 9780349146409
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256