A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, Tommy Orange
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, Tommy Orange
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A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
Ten Kafkaesque Stories

Author: Tommy Orange, Ali Smith, Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Charlie Kaufman, Leone Ross, Joshua Cohen

Narrator: Penelope Rawlins, Matt Reeves, Jessica Hayles, Minhee Yeo

Unabridged: 5 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/04/2024

Categories: Fiction, Satire, Mashups

Synopsis

What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. 

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

About The Author

With contributions from: Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross, and Ali Smith. 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on June 28, 2024

rip franz kafka you would have loved real estate brokers some of these stories were really good and really captured the kafkaesque scary grueling monotony of bureaucracy in modern life: undergoing MRIs you don't think you need, that elif batuman rendering of buying an apartment. some of these were rea......more

Goodreads review by Krista on February 01, 2024

In the inverted world of Franz Kafka, guilt precedes sin and punishment precedes trial — so naturally, the cage precedes the bird. “A cage went in search of a bird,” he wrote with enigmatic flourish in 1917, when he was convalescing in the pastoral town of Zürau in the wake of his tuberculosis di......more

Goodreads review by Blair on June 13, 2024

This anthology has a starry list of contributors but it’s full of so-so stories, the kind where you think ‘hmm, that was fine’ and then promptly forget everything about it. Best of the bunch is Helen Oyeyemi’s weird and entertaining ‘Hygiene’, told through messages and emails, in which a man suddenl......more

Goodreads review by Ben on July 16, 2024

Maybe 'Kafkaesque' stories are better when they're not explicitly trying to be 'Kafkaesque'...? I've read better strange tales over the past few years that could bear the same descriptor, but weren't written to specifically evoke his style/content; at least, not that the author admitted! A few of th......more

Goodreads review by carly on August 03, 2024

i wanted to love this so much! there were a few enjoyable essays (my favorite was god’s doorbell), but the collection as a whole just fell a bit flat for me. as a lot of other readers mentioned, some of the works were good reads, some were kafkaesque, but few hit both points......more

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