The Kafka Studies Department

<p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>From Francis Levy author of </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Seven Days in Rio</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> which </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The New York Times</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> called a fever dream of a novel comes </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Kafka Studies Department</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> a highly original collection of short parable-like stories infused with dark humor intellect and insight about the human condition. While the book's style is deceptively simple and aphoristic it carries a hallucinatory moral message. A prism of interconnected and intertwined tales inspired by Kafka the stories examine feckless central characters</span> who <span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>are far from likable but always recognizable and wildly human.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p>Knowledge is not power power is not power. Life is irrational or accidental or both. We drift victims victimizers. A collection for our time.</p><p>-Joan Baum NPR</p><p> </p><p>A collection of bleak and amusing literary short stories from Levy...A dark sometimes funny meditation on the absurd trials of life.</p><p>-<em>Kirkus Reviews</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Francis Levy has an unhampered endearingly maverick imagination-as if Donald Barthelme had met up with Maimonides and together they decided to write about the world as it appeared to them. These deceptively simple and parable-like stories are full of wily pleasures and irreverent wisdom about everything from the failure of insight to make anything happen to the subtle gratifications of friendship to the tragicomedy of eros.</span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>-</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Daphne Merkin author of </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>This Close to Happy</em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> and </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>22 Minutes of Unconditional Love</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </em></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Francis Levy's fiction is knowing but never instructive. His characters inhabit a twilight zone where the lines blur between dream and waking familiar and surreal inevitability and surprise. -Rocco Landesman Broadway producer and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Kafka Studies Department </em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>is not about academia. It's about anomie and...what's really going on with people. Of course (since it's Levy) it's about sex. Kafka's shadow is everywhere. -David Kirkpatrick journalist and author of </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Facebook Effect</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>A startling collection of thirty literary gems deftly illustrated by Hallie Cohen into dreamy sketches which perfectly suit the tone of the work. Initially it seems like these stories are fed into a kind of a magical Kafka Cuisinart where they come out tightly sealed hilariously ironic and occasionally mysterious...modern parables that have the makings of mini-masterpieces. -</span><span style=color: rgba(31 31 31 1)>Arthur Nersesian</span><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> author of </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Five Books of Moses </em><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>and </span><em style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>The Fuck-Up</em></p>