Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories

by Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper (Adapted by), Peter Kuper (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 2018 Silver Reuben Award for Graphic Novels
A Boston Globe and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year

In Kafkaesque, Peter Kuper combines stunning artistic technique with shrewd political and social commentary for a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Franz Kafka short stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358216
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

Peter Kuper wrote the Eisner Award–winning Ruins and critically acclaimed adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, and Metamorphosis. He founded the political anthology World War 3 Illustrated, writes and draws Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy, and taught Harvard University’s first class dedicated to graphic novels and comics.

 

Peter Kuper wrote the Eisner Award–winning Ruins and critically acclaimed adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, and Metamorphosis. He founded the political anthology World War 3 Illustrated, writes and draws Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy, and taught Harvard University’s first class dedicated to graphic novels and comics.

 

Date of Birth:

July 3, 1883

Date of Death:

June 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Prague, Austria-Hungary

Place of Death:

Vienna, Austria

Education:

German elementary and secondary schools. Graduated from German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague.

Editorial Reviews

"Stark yet playful interpretations in the woodcut tradition of Käthe Kollwitz, Frans Masereel, and Lynd Ward."

Boston Globe

"The Kafkaesque humor is intact, even enhanced."

Wall Street Journal - Sarah Boxer

"Kafka’s work is opaque and ripe for reinterpretation, but it is Kuper’s art that makes it so fresh."

Times Literary Supplement - Tom Tivnan

"Woe to the reader who tries to skim Peter Kuper’s Kafkaesque.… [Kuper’s] faux woodcuts, with their explosive faces and grim chiaroscuro, cannot be easily digested—a supreme virtue."

Vulture - Abraham Riesman

"In distilling Kafka's timeless themes, Kuper creates stark panels of disturbing truth and powerful warning."

Booklist - Terry Hong

"Brilliant…. The Kafkaesque humor is intact, even enhanced."

Wall Street Journal

"Kafka has found a perfect interpreter in Peter Kuper."

Hearst CT News

"[Kuper] does what I love. Jazz. This book is a series of riffs, visual improvisations on short takes by the old master. It becomes a diverting, even daring, high-wire act, where Kafka’s stoic Euro-alienation meets and merges with Kuper’s thoroughly American rock-and-roll alienation."

Jules Feiffer

"Kafkaesque has the quality of being not simply an adaptation but an artistic object in its own right."

Los Angeles Review of Books - John W. W. Zeiser

"Woe to the reader who tries to skim Kafkaesque…. [Kuper’s] faux woodcuts, with their explosive faces and grim chiaroscuro, cannot be easily digested — a supreme virtue."

Vulture

2018-07-02
After tackling Franz Kafka's best-known work in the 2004 graphic novel The Metamorphosis, Kuper (Fight Fascism!, 2017, etc.) returns to the literary master to adapt 14 more of his short stories.This adaptation's source material runs from several dozen pages ("The Penal Colony") to just a handful of lines ("A Little Fable"), and Kuper proves adept at using the synergy between text and image to both expand Kafka's ideas and trim his word counts. In "The Trees," Kuper lays the sparse text over a tableau of homelessness, giving additional poignancy to the story's suggestion of life's impermanence, and his depiction of the frustrated supplicant in "Before the Law" brings the story into a modern, racial context. For "The Burrow," Kuper uses a small fraction of the original text and mostly expresses the story's mania with subterranean cross-sectional views of the titular burrow as well as visual echoes between the burrow's labyrinthine tunnels and the wrinkles of the narrator's troubled brain. Kafka's prose often inhabits a mental space more so than a physical one, with monologues from surreal characters (a person stretched across a chasm, acting as a bridge; a destitute person riding an empty coal bucket through winter streets and then high above them), giving Kuper wide leeway for his visual depictions, which he creatively indulges, as when he imagines the ironic camaraderie of "nobodies" in "Trip into the Mountains" as being shared among a Paleolithic tribe. Kuper's chosen medium—drawings on scratchboard—gives the work the angular, crosshatched chiaroscuro of woodcuts, which keenly evokes the text's early-20th-century origins, while his style imbues the characters with a garish cartoon quality that unequivocally expresses emotions while also underscoring the nightmarish conditions of the worlds presented.A richly innovative interpretation that honors the source while expanding the material.

Kirkus Reviews