This is not your ordinary short story collection. In his newest work, Daniel Chacón subverts expectation and bends the rules of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture. These stories explore the concept of a wall that reaches beyond our immediate thoughts of a towering physical structure. While Chacón aims to address the partition along the U.S.-Mexico border, he also uses these stories to work through the intangible walls that divide communities and individuals—particularly those who straddle multiple cultures in their daily lives. Set in El Paso and other Latinx-dominant urban spaces, Kafka in a Skirt is an immersive look into the myriad lives of the characters who inhabit these culturally diverse areas. Chacón masterfully weaves elements of the surreal and fantastic through a shining tapestry of fiction, creating moments of touching realism in contrast with scenes that are fascinatingly unfamiliar. Occasionally teasing the ghosts of Jorge Luis Borges and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, this collection disregards boundaries and transports readers into a world merely parallel to our own. Kafka in a Skirt unravels the intricacies of culture, sexuality, love, and loneliness in a collection that shows the personal implications of barriers while remaining hopeful and bright.

'One should either be a work of art, or wear one', proclaimed Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century; 'I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else', Franz Kafka proclaimed a brief decade later. Between these two claims lies the largely unexplored region in which the European decadent movement turned into the modernist avant-garde. In this original historical study, Mark Anderson explores Kafka's early dandyism, his interest in fashion, literary decadence and the 'superficial' spectacle of modern urban life as well as his subsequent repudiation of these phenomena in forging a literary identity as the isolated, otherworldly 'poet' of modern alienation. Rather than posit a break between these two personae, Anderson charts the historical continuities between the young Kafka and the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. The book demonstrates how clothing functions as a semi-private code of meaning in his literary works and the extent to which the aestheticist notion of becoming the work of art haunts Kafka's conception of writing throughout his life. The result is a startlingly unconventional portrait of Kafka and Prague at the turn of the century, involving such issues as Jugendstil aesthetics, Otto Weininger's 'egoless' woman, the Viennese critique of architectural ornament, the clothing-reform movement, anti-Semitism and the question of Jewish-German writing.

This is not your ordinary short story collection. In his newest work, Daniel Chacón subverts expectation and bends the rules of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture. These stories explore the concept of a wall that reaches beyond our immediate thoughts of a towering physical structure. While Chacón aims to address the partition along the U.S.-Mexico border, he also uses these stories to work through the intangible walls that divide communities and individuals—particularly those who straddle multiple cultures in their daily lives. Set in El Paso and other Latinx-dominant urban spaces, Kafka in a Skirt is an immersive look into the myriad lives of the characters who inhabit these culturally diverse areas. Chacón masterfully weaves elements of the surreal and fantastic through a shining tapestry of fiction, creating moments of touching realism in contrast with scenes that are fascinatingly unfamiliar. Occasionally teasing the ghosts of Jorge Luis Borges and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, this collection disregards boundaries and transports readers into a world merely parallel to our own. Kafka in a Skirt unravels the intricacies of culture, sexuality, love, and loneliness in a collection that shows the personal implications of barriers while remaining hopeful and bright.

These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with early forms of Zionism and the Yiddish theater despite his longing to be assimilated into the minority German culture in Prague; of his off-again, on-again engagement to Felice Bauer; of his long friendship with Max Brod; and of the outbreak of World War I, a war whose horrors Kafka's own writings sometimes seemed to prefigure."--BOOK JACKET.

The legal system is often denounced as "Kafkaesque"—but what does this really mean? This is the question Douglas E. Litowitz tackles in his critical reading of Franz Kafka's writings about the law. Going far beyond Kafka's most familiar works—such as The Trial—Litowitz assembles a broad array of works that he refers to as "Kafka's legal fiction"—consisting of published and unpublished works that deal squarely with the law, as well as those that touch upon it indirectly, as in political, administrative, and quasi-judicial procedures. Cataloguing, explaining, and critiquing this body of work, Litowitz brings to bear all those aspects of Kafka's life that were connected to law—his legal education, his career as a lawyer, his drawings, and his personal interactions with the legal system. A close study of Kafka's legal writings reveals that Kafka held a consistent position about modern legal systems, characterized by a crippling nihilism. Modern legal systems, in Kafka's view, consistently fail to make good on their stated pretensions—in fact often accomplish the opposite of what they promise. This indictment, as Litowitz demonstrates, is not confined to the legal system of Kafka's day, but applies just as surely to our own. A short, clear, comprehensive introduction to Kafka's legal writings and thought, Kafka's Indictment of Modern Law is not uncritical. Even as he clarifies Kafka's experience of and ideas about the law, Litowitz offers an informed perspective on the limitations of these views. His book affords rare insight into a key aspect of Kafka's work, and into the connection between the writing, the writer, and the legal world.

"It is widely acknowledged that Kafka's daytime occupation as a specialist in industrial accident insurance contributed in a significant way to his fiction. Corngold and Wagner frame Kafka's writings as cultural events, each work reflecting the economic and cultural discourses of his epoch. In pursuing Kafka's avowed interest in the theory and practice of insurance, the authors view the two systems of his literary worlds--the official and the personal--as a "bundling" together of the various cultural accidents of Kafka's time. The work of two of the leading scholars of the single most influential writer of literary modernity, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine constitutes a breathtakingly original advance in the study of both the more famous and less well-known works of this enigmatic master."--From publisher description.