Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 29th July 2025
Paperback
Published: 28th May 2024
Hardback
Published: 29th October 2024
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories
By (Author) Ali Smith
By (author) Tommy Orange
By (author) Naomi Alderman
By (author) Helen Oyeyemi
By (author) Keith Ridgway
By (author) Yiyun Li
By (author) Charlie Kaufman
By (author) Elif Batuman
Introduction by Becca Rothfeld
By (author) Leone Ross
Little, Brown Book Group
Abacus
28th May 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Short stories
813.008
Paperback
256
Width 134mm, Height 214mm, Spine 24mm
260g
A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one hundred years since his death
Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation, adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes - and very few artists in any field have created work that captures so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence.What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today 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 anxiety attacks, these specially commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.The authors in this book have won prizes including The Women's Prize for Fiction, the American Book Award, an Academy Award, multiple BAFTAs and the Writers Guild of America Award; and they have been shortlisted for prizes including the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. From countries including China, the USA, Ireland and the UK, and living now in cities around the globe from Prague to New York City, the authors represent how far-reaching Kafka's influence is across the world.