The Kafka Studies Department

From Francis Levy, author of Seven Days in Rio, which The New York Times called "a fever dream of a novel," comes The Kafka Studies Department, 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 who are far from likable, but always recognizable and wildly human.



"Knowledge is not power, power is not power. Life is irrational or accidental or both. We drift victims, victimizers. A collection for our time."

-Joan Baum, NPR



"A collection of bleak and amusing literary short stories from Levy...A dark, sometimes funny, meditation on the absurd trials of life."

-Kirkus Reviews



"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."-Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love