Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka

(Paperback)

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Description

Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would-be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time. Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.

Reviews

"Fancifully embroidering into the narrative Nietzsche's themes and aphorisms--'Every sentence is a kiss'--Olsen is a fine and daring writer, equal to the material."
"Olsen is among the finest writers of social critique and speculative fiction today."
"Smart and moving and elegant, its seemingly offhand scenes are as effortlessly poignant as a handful of old snapshots." -- Shelley Jackson
"This book is proof that there are pleasures of the mind." -- Kathy Acker

Author Bio

Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing practices. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading. He is a Guggenheim and an N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of the Berlin Prize and a Pushcart, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.