File this away as: “Hey, this is cool.” The Associated Press reports that Germany has handed over 5,000 personal documents owned by Franz Kafka’s confidant, Max Brod. The documents range from letters… Read more »

It’s a random Tuesday in the End Times, and there’s no sense in waiting: let us together watch The Franz Kafka Rock Opera from Home Movies, aka the best three minutes of… Read more »

The publishing industry has a tendency to melt its most sacred proper nouns down into tiny silver adjectival balls, put a quarter in the machine, pull the spring, and just let ’em… Read more »

Ahoy-hoy! Another week down; another bunch of insane Trump appointees, another bouquet of oh-c’mon-now tweets, another round of casualties to 2016 (goodbye to language poet Ray DiPalma, legendary New York bookseller Robert A. Wilson,… Read more »

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award–winning author Philip Roth is donating his collection of 4,000 books to Newark Public Library, the writer’s “other home” while he was a student at… Read more »

Before his death in July of 1961, Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to the executors of his estate saying, “It is my wish that none of the letters written by… Read more »

1913 is now available in paperback.  Just before one of its darkest moments came the twentieth century’s most exciting year . . . It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt… Read more »

It’s not so surprising that admirers of a famous person’s work can become interested in that person’s personal life. Maybe they want to further explore what makes their favorite playwright… Read more »

As a new stage production of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis reveals, it’s waking up as a robot. The Japanese director Oriza Hirata has cast a robot to play the part… Read more »

Just before one of its darkest moments came the twentieth century’s most exciting year . . . It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the… Read more »