Franz Kafka was a Czech novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations, like those depicted in his writing.
John Joseph Vincent Kessel is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. He is a prolific short story writer, and the author of four solo novels, Good News From Outer Space (1989), Corrupting Dr. Nice (1997), The Moon and the Other (2017), and Pride and Prometheus (2018), and one novel, Freedom Beach (1985) in collaboration with his friend James Patrick Kelly. Kessel is married to author Therese Anne Fowler.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Flash fiction is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story ; the "dribble" ; the "drabble" ; "sudden fiction" ; "flash fiction" ; and "microstory".
Peter Kuper is an American alternative comics artist and illustrator, best known for his autobiographical, political, and social observations.
Daniel Fuchs was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist.
James Patrick Kelly is an American science fiction author who has won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award.
Motherless Brooklyn is a novel by Jonathan Lethem that was first published in 1999. The story is set in Brooklyn, and follows Lionel Essrog, a detective who has Tourette's, a disorder marked by involuntary tics. Essrog works for Frank Minna, a small-time neighborhood owner of a "seedy and makeshift" detective agency. Together, Essrog and three other characters—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—call themselves "the Minna Men".
"The Burrow" is an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka written six months before his death. In the story a badger-like creature struggles to secure the labyrinthine burrow he has excavated as a home. The story was published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer by Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor. The first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. It appeared in The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections.
James Lasdun is an English novelist and poet.
Subterranean Press is a small press publisher in Burton, Michigan. Subterranean is best known for publishing genre fiction, primarily horror, suspense and dark mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. In addition to publishing novels, short story collections and chapbooks, Subterranean also produced a quarterly publication called Subterranean Magazine from 2005 to 2014, specialising in short fiction and edited by William Schafer; it had also an online direct seller. In addition to trade editions, the company produces collector's and limited editions. These books are issued with author signatures, in both numbered and lettered states, and are produced using high-grade book papers and bindings with matching slipcases and traycases.
"Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor" is an incomplete story by Franz Kafka. Probably written at the beginning of 1915, it first appeared in 1936 in the collection Beschreibung eines Kampfes.
"The Vulture" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written sometime between 1917 and 1923.
Starlight is a science fiction and fantasy series edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and published by Tor Books.
Rebecca Wolff is a poet, fiction writer, and the editor and creator of both Fence Magazine and Fence Books.
Carter Scholz is an American speculative fiction author and composer of music. He lives in California.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2000 is an anthology of science fiction short works edited by Gregory Benford. It was first published in hardcover and trade paperback by Harcourt in April 2000.
Universe 2 is an anthology of original science fiction short stories edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, the second volume in a series of three, continuing an earlier series of the same name edited by Terry Carr. It was first published in hardcover Bantam Books and trade paperback by Bantam Spectra in March 1992.
Shelley Laura Frisch is an American literary translator from German to English. She is best known for her translations of biographies, most notably of Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl.
