Overview

Modernist master. Arch absurdist. Gothic satirist. Jewish mystic. Who was Franz Kafka?

A century after his death, readers and fellow writers are still grappling with the gnomic, utterly absorbing work of this beguiling literary artist. From haunting stories like “The Metamorphosis” and “In the Penal Colony” to prophetic novels like The Trial and The Castle, today Kafka’s writings sound both contemporary and eternal, like dispatches extracted from the earth’s core — an influence on generations of writers across the globe, from the Surrealists to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Joshua Cohen.

Gathering a wide-ranging group of contemporary writers profoundly marked by Kafka, Cohen leads a reading and conversation on his singular relevance — and why, 100 years after his death, we are still decoding him.