Kafka Americana
by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz

Description:
Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz seize a helpless Frank Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as a scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a professional conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, for a night f musing on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Wells, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial where Kafka faces, needless to say, fraudulent charges. Taking Modernism's presiding genius for a literary joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous workd that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived.