Spent the afternoon and evening reading this. While the title story is distinctly weird--the word I'd go for is "surreal," though that might not have been in the vocabulary yet when Kafka was writing--most of the stories here seem better described as "neurotic." The big takeaway for me is that fiction from 100-ish years ago is going to be *alien*, whatever the intent, and that's almost certainly amplified by works being in translation (though I've had bad experiences with works in translation, this wasn't one). There are some fragmentary-seeming things that don't really resolve, which these days I might be inclined to call "prose poems," and those tend to work less well than the stories, probably because what makes them work in German simply doesn't convey to English.
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Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie
This is labeled as an epistolary novel, but that's not entirely right. There are entries that could not possibly have been written, fr...
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I read this book like thirty years ago (ack!) when I was in college, and I remembered liking it, and when my wife picked it as a classic-i...
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The cover text calls this something like "one of the most important novels" blah blah blah. It's not a novel, it's a disc...
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Not a novel, which ... well ... some of the events described in the book would stretch credulity in fiction. It's a book about the lie...
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