The Mumpsimus

Strange Horizons has just published a collection of short notices from reviewers about what they read and viewed in 2013 . I thought there were too many good things in 2013 for me to be able to even simply list them all in the 250 words I was allowed, so I decided instead to focus on the writer who had, to my knowledge, the best 2013: Richard Bowes. The other entries are also fascinating, so it makes for a great reading list. Thinking back on 2013 after I wrote my previous post looking back on the year, I realized I left two important books out that would have been there if I'd remembered they were 2013 books — for some reason, in my mind, they were 2012 books. The first is Kit Reed's extraordinary retrospective collection The Story Until Now . In a great year for story collections, this was among the absolute best. The other is the second published and translated volume of Reiner Stach's eventually 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insi...

a doodle by Franz Kafka Today is Franz Kafka's 130th birthday, as Google has reminded us , and it reminded me that one of the first and most obscure stories I published was largely about, or at least inspired by, Kafka. I'd been reading the diaries and the letters to Felice Bauer .  I'd dipped into the diaries before, reading around in random order, but had never read them very comprehensively, which is a considerably different experience. While the diaries were fascinating, if sometimes tedious, I loathed the Kafka that came through via the letters to Felice. How she put up with him is beyond me. (The relationship would become clearer when I read Reiner Stach's excellent Kafka: The Decisive Years , which has now been completed in English with the translation of  Kafka: The Years of Insight , a book I've just recently begun reading.) All this reading got me thinking about narcissistic heterosexuality, fragmentary identities, and, somehow or other, the relatio...

Some preliminary, inadequate notes on J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Childhood of Jesus , after a first reading: Kafka and Cervantes haunt this novel, as they haunt so much of Coetzee's work. Cervantes is there on the pages — the boy David carries around a children's copy of Don Quixote  and learns to read from it. Kafka is more of a ghost in the book, a presence haunting its words.  The Childhood of Jesus  tempts us toward reading it as allegory, a tendency common to Kafka's work, and Coetzee has written insightfully about Kafka many times, including a valuable essay on "Translating Kafka" in Stranger Shores  that criticizes Edwin and Willa Muir's allegorical and religious reading of Kafka and the effect it had on their translations. Reading Coetzee allegorically is always a false path and yet one he seems to enjoy tempting readers toward. This time, the temptation is even in the title. The title is mischievous, because there is no character named...

From a New Inquiry Q&A with Eileen Myles: What ‘bad’ genres did you grow up reading — science fiction, fairy tales, romance, etc. — or read as an adult? I resist the question entirely. I don’t think quotes ['...'] dispense with the idea of putting writing into good and bad genres. Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today. Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I’m not a writer to be protected at all. I love science fiction, have all my life and it’s where I met Kafka. Angela Carter is swimming around in there too. Science fiction propelled me into poetry and writing in general and if I think of the childre...

Franz Kafka's editor: The story is true. Kafka simply wrote a completely verifiable, journalistic account of a neighbor by the name of Gregor Samsa who, because of some bizarre medical condition, turned into a ‘monstrous vermin.’ Kafka assured us that he’d made the whole thing up. We now know that to be completely false. I wonder if Penguin will offer me a refund for the new Michael Hofmann translation of the stories that I bought a few days ago? Meanwhile, some of my super-secret, oh-so-influential, don't-you-wish-you-were-as-connected-as-I-am-nah-nah-nah-nah sources within the publishing industry tell me that Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist , will soon be revealed to be not a memoir of a family's amusing exploits down digestive tracts (as we've all thought for years), but rather a microeconomic study of the effects of household income as a determinant of natural gas consumption. Keep your eyes out for further revelations!

At The Valve, John Holbo just posted this cover from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries : Yes, indeed -- Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka in one pulp magazine together! But it's better than that. Here's the entire table of contents: Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard Pendulum by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse Bernie Goes to Hell by Arthur Dekker Savage Find the Happy Children by Benjamin Ferris The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Haunted Hostel by Emma L'Hommedieu Frost Dirge (Aztec) by Louis M. Hobbs Anthem by Ayn Rand Yes, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka all in one issue! (All reprints -- I would love to know what went through Mary Gnaedinger's mind as she put it together...) As noted at The Valve, this was the final issue of FFM , "after which the magazine evidently died of confusion." This is apparently a particularly rare issue -- the least expensive copy I could find on the internet is going for $61, and it...