A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a prophet and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. 

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

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Published Jun 4, 2024

224 pages

Average rating: 8

1 RATING

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Community Reviews

Laura Kershaw
Jan 07, 2025
8/10 stars
I was a fan of most of the stories in this collection. It has several authors I was interested in reading more from and I thought it was a good little survey of their work before diving into a full novel.

I tend to like short story collections and am grading this a little friendlier because of the difficulty of the medium.

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