Here are 100 books that Kafka in Love fans have personally recommended if you like
Kafka in Love.
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I taught at Yale for 33 years and I hold advanced degrees from the Sorbonne. I am interested in literature as lessons for life, but I am mostly a passionate letter writer, especially to the great authors who have marked me. They are never really dead. I carry them around with me.
I selected the category of Offbeat Memoirs because I have written one. I also have an Italian alter-ego, Donatella de Poitiers, who authors a blog in which she muses about how a lifelong Francophile could have forsaken la Belle France for la dolce vita in the Umbrian countryside, where the food and fresh air are way better than the roads.
What do the writers you are drawn to reveal about you? Why at certain points in our lives do we become “attached” to certain authors? The process of attachment is mysterious. As we age (and change) some things remain constant. Our attachment to a particular author may have begun in our youth, but evolved as we have. To reconnect with a favorite author can put us in touch with our younger self in unexpected ways. Mead shows how much Middlemarch has “spoken” to her throughout her life. This book is perhaps more in harmony with my own than any on the list. I have come to love books that underscore how what we read can be inseparable from the person we become.
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described…
I’ve finally realized that you can’t outwork yourself out of systemic problems and that so many of the messages we receive have got the problem wrong. Growing up, I was taught to respect my elders. To defer to those who know what they are talking about. But just because someone says something with conviction doesn’t mean they are right. What we’ve been told is imposter syndrome could actually be imposter treatment, and it messes deeply with our sense of self. So even if I’ve taught at brand name institutions, at corporate heavyweights, and on six continents, I’m always seeking to learn.
This book opened my eyes to see introversion as a strength rather than a weakness. But more so, it gave me the permission to question how things that we took as “just the way things are” might have been positioned incorrectly from the start.
If it wasn’t true that introversion is inherently worse than extroversion, what else might popular culture and mainstream workplace practices have gotten wrong? I felt seen by the book and hopeful of what more honest conversations about how people are wired might both reveal and help heal.
SUSAN CAIN'S NEW BOOK, BITTERSWEET, IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW
A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE HOW YOU SEE INTROVERTS - AND YOURSELF - FOREVER.
Our lives are driven by a fact that most of us can't name and don't understand. It defines who our friends and lovers are, which careers we choose, and whether we blush when we're embarrassed.
That fact is whether we're an introvert or an extrovert.
The most fundamental dimension of personality, at least a third of us are introverts, and yet shyness, sensitivity and seriousness are often seen as…
I love humans. My clients and colleagues tell me that my profound love for humans is my superpower—that I make people feel safe and seen. I also understand that loving humans isn’t effortless. I wasn’t always in the loving-humans camp. While I was doing a doctorate at Harvard, I studied with the marvelous Robert Kegan, whose theory and methodology helped me see the fullness of the diverse people I got to interview. Ever since, I have been totally enthralled by what makes us unique—and also connected. If you are a human or have to deal with humans, your life will be much improved if you love them more!
I love a good memoir, and this one was a perfect example of the form. Thoughtful, funny, incredibly well-written, and structured, I cared deeply about Lori and her patients. As she weaves together stories from her training as a therapist, her patients, and her work with her own therapist, we see how incredibly damaging life and love are for us—and how those scars themselves make us more beautiful, more worthy of love, more capable of opening our hearts to others.
This does not make the human experience look easy or painless, but it does help me remember what the work is for and how beautiful the pathway can be when we have good company on the way. This book was excellent company for me.
Ever wonder what your therapist is thinking? Now you can find out, as therapist and New York Times bestselling author Lori Gottlieb takes us behind the scenes of her practice - where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).
When a personal crisis causes her world to come crashing down, Lori Gottlieb - an experienced therapist with a thriving practice in Los Angeles - is suddenly adrift. Enter Wendell, himself a veteran therapist with an unconventional style, whose sessions with Gottlieb will prove transformative for her.
I grew up in a small agricultural town in California’s Sacramento Valley, and my parents didn’t even consider worrying if I was bored or lonely when I wasn’t at school. Consequently, I spent hours in a nearby vacant lot riddled with anthills watching the ants hustle back and forth and, occasionally, inserting myself in their lives with handfuls of sugar or sticks to block their paths. Pretty sure this is where my interest in science and nature began—and maybe even my interest in cooperation.
I follow Renkl’s wonderful writing in the New York Times about the nature in her own neighborhood (and occasionally Southern politics), and Late Migrations is a collection of essays in which she ties together the loss of family with the losses of beloved wildlife.
She wrote such a gorgeous last paragraph about living with grief. “And that’s how I learned the world would go on. An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, ‘It’s benign.’ Someone was saying, ‘It’s a boy.’ Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ I tear up every time I read those lines.
Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of Books
Southern Book Prize Finalist
From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family-and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.
Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents-her exuberant, creative mother; her steady,…
With my 64 works of fiction I have tried passionately to give expressions for and to dive into the complexity of love relationships in both historical and present contexts, especially as in Land of Shadows in the view of pounding conflicts presented to fictive or historical persons, having thereby always respect for documentary research added to my own personal experiences. Also the Greek myths have been a guide for my writing, as in the case of Land of Shadows, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, reflecting old insights of mankind. Being now with my novels and plays represented in 41 countries, I see this as a sign of readers 'round the globe sharing my passion.
These letters of Franz Kafka to his Czech translator Milena are not formally a novel but in its essence the love novel, none of his novels were. He wrote them 1920-1923, being ill with tuberculosis as he was visiting different sanatoriums in Germany and Czechoslovakia and she was living in Vienna in an unhappy marriage. As they only saw each other shortly three times it forms a love by letters story of burning love transforming itself into misunderstandings and conflict. Their value lies in the genial Kafka’s trying and succeeding in communicating something incommunicable about how it is to be in love accounting totally honestly for his vast complexity of emotions from the utmost passion and longing to the state of fear of being rejected. A great inspiration to me for my novel in writing about Kafka.
Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience.
Milena, for her part, was passionate and intrepid, cool and intelligent in her decisions but reckless when her emotions were involved. Kafka once described her as living her life 'so intensely down to such depths'. If she did suffer through him, it was part of her great appetite…
I’ve always loved books about outsiders and stories that make you palpably feel what others do. In real life and fiction, the characters that interest me most are often outsiders. Because characters on the outside of social groups and norms are often isolated and lonely, there is something so powerful about works that can bring you inside their experience and relate what their inner life is like. Interiority is the great strength of literature, and stories that convey the inner architecture of outsiders have always attracted me. I love books that make me feel deeply connected and that linger in my subconscious long after I’ve read them.
The title story, A Hunger Artist, affected me in such a stunning and mysterious way. It just floored me and got under my skin. I felt distraught for several days. When I first read this story, I had just begun my MFA in creative writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio in 2014, and I was interested in examining why certain works had an impact on me as a reader and how I could learn the writing craft from them.
I re-read the story several times to try and figure out the source of its power but could not. The title story—and the rest of the stories in the collection—are written in a direct, matter-of-fact way that doesn’t draw attention to their style. But these stories involved me directly in a deep, mysterious, and emotional experience.
'In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.'
Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their entirety in this edition, which also contains other, uncollected stories and a selection of posthumously published works that have become part of the Kafka canon.
Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, these stories approach human experience at a tangent: a singing mouse, an ape, an inquisitive dog, and a paranoid burrowing creature are among the protagonists, as well as the professional starvation…
Hello. My name is Mike Russell. I write books (novels, short story collections and novellas) and make visual art (mostly paintings, occasionally sculptures). I love art and books that are surreal and magical because that is the way life seems to me, and I love art and books that are mind-expanding because we need to expand our minds to perceive just how surreal and magical life is. My books have been described as strange fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, magic realism, fantasy fiction… but I just like to call them Strange Books.
I love stories that are many things at the same time. They can open a person up to a wider perspective, a greater awareness; that’s the kind of story I love to write. Kafka’s stories can be considered as absurd allegory, as surreal evocations of mystery and magic, as psychological study, as satire, as dark comedy… as all of these and more at once. Many of Kafka’s stories were considered by the author to be unfinished but to me they seem complete. Kafka famously tried to ‘finish’ all of his stories once and for all by instructing his friend to destroy them after his death. Thankfully, he was prevented from adding that final full stop.
This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
I can’t remember a time I haven’t been drawn to and fascinated by the link between absurdity/humor and horror. Both genres involve setups and payoffs. The tension built up needs to be released in either a gasp or a laugh. In my own writing, I try to make myself giggle in joy at the ridiculousness of a situation and then recoil at the underlying horror that anchors it to the real world. It’s a balance I constantly try to reach and that I personally find is a joy to read.
I read somewhere that Franz Kafka would laugh so loud when writing his stories that he woke up his neighbors. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I get it. It’s not what is commonly thought of when someone talks about Kafka’s stories. I mean, his name has come to mean a certain style. “Kafkaesque” is used to describe stories that are absurd, nightmarish, offensive, and heavy with bureaucratic pretentiousness and deceit.
Where is the humor? Oh, it’s there. I think sometimes readers get caught up in the horror and bizarreness of it all that they miss the subtle, absurdist, dark, and very dry humor dripping in all these stories in this collection.
THE TRIAL; THE CASTLE; AMERICA- Both Joseph K in THE TRIAL and K in THE CASTLE are victims of anonymous governing forces beyond their control. Both are atomised, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Whereas Joseph K is relentlessly hunted down for a crime that remains nameless, K ceaselessly attempts to enter the castle and so belong somewhere. Together these novels may be read as powerful allegories of totalitarian government in whatever guise it appears today. In AMERICA Karl Rossmann is 'packed off to America by his parents' to experience Oedipal and cultural isolation. Here, ordinary immigrants are…
I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.
Franz Kafka is best known for this book, though he has written many others, including The Trial. The novel explores social and political topics through the use of the fantastic, in this case, a man who wakes up one morning and finds he has turned into a gigantic cockroach.
I am drawn to books that explore things in ways that have not been explored before and books that make one think. I read this one in college; it has stuck with me and influenced me through my writing career.
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century…
I’m often asked if my Worst-Case Scenario books are serious or humorous. And my answer is always the same: “Yes!” While inspired by pop culture and the survival situations we see again and again in movies and on TV, the information in my books is real. I spend a lot of time seeking out experts to interview—the people who actually have done this stuff—and then distilling their survival wisdom into the form you see in the books. As humans, we want to be prepared for life’s twists and turns. Even if it’s, you know, when the aliens arrive. I’ve been a survival writer and humorist for 25 years and I ain’t stopping now!
This pick is probably the outlier of my list, and I’ll explain why. Berlin Noir is actually three books published as a compendium: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem.
You can buy them individually, but I highly recommend you pick up the trilogy: spoiler alert, it’s 800 pages (with small print!) I’ve always been a fan of Kerr’s mind-bogglingly well-researched historical novels, and these three are, in my opinion, his best.
They are about a German detective, who is not a Nazi, attempting to survive and make a living just before, during, and just after WWII. Far, far more than a simple mystery (though the plot is fascinatingly complex, and elements and characters run through all three books, which is why I recommend the trilogy), the books are a treatise on good, evil, moral relativity, and survival under unimaginable circumstances in a country wracked by tyranny.…
