News You Can Bruise for 2009 September 3

I just read a bunch of Franz Kafka--everything of his except the novels. Let me tell you, there's a lot of boring stuff in that corpus. But there's not so much stuff, total, that you could put together a "just the good parts" anthology that could compete with the complete short works. Especially since the ideal length for a Kafka story is about one page. For me a good Kafka story is like a good Lovecraft story: it knocks you over and runs away.

So I thought I'd share my list of the Kafka stories that I thought were really good, so that you don't have to go through a bunch of stuff that just flails at you without knocking you over. I've added links to translations, when I could find them.

Short-shorts:

• Before the Law
• Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys
• The Sudden Walk
• The New Advocate
• An Old Manuscript
• The Knock at the Manor Gate
• The Cares of a Family Man
• The Truth About Sancho Panza
• The Silence of the Sirens
• Poseidon
• On Parables

Longer stories:

• The Metamorphosis
• In the Penal Colony (as close as Kafka gets to gross-out horror)
• The Great Wall of China
• A Hunger Artist
• The Burrow (works surprisingly well as Dwarf Fortress fanfic!)