{"product_id":"excavating-kafka-book-james-hawes-9781849161640","title":"Excavating Kafka","description":"Kafka's features, and that dreaded word, Kafkaesque, are known to millions who have never read serious literature. Generations of academics and critics have maintained the image of Franz Kafka as a tortured seer whose works defy interpretation. In Excavating Kafka James Hawes reveals the truth that lies beneath the image of a middle-European Nostradamus with a typographically irresistible name. The real Franz Kafka was no angst-ridden paranoid but a well-groomed young man-about-town who frequented brothels, had regular sex with a penniless-but-pretty girl and subscribed to upmarket pornography (published by the very man who published Kafka's first stories). Excavating Kafka debunks a number of key facets of the Kafka-Myth, including the idea that Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime; that he was stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to find time to write; that he was tormented by fear of sex; that he had a uniquely terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs; that his literature is mysterious and opaque; that he constructs fantasy-worlds in which innocent everymen live in fear of mysterious and totalitarian powers-that-be. Written with the panache of a supremely gifted comic writer, Excavating Kafka is an engaging and involving reassessment of a major figure of literary modernism that will be welcomed and enjoyed by students of Kafka and by general readers alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49529800229137,"sku":"GOR002436904","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49542777995537,"sku":"GOR007612641","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50269072818449,"sku":"CIN184916164XVG","price":7.75,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51272120140049,"sku":"CIN184916164XG","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53149012459793,"sku":"CIN184916164XA","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/184916164X.jpg?v=1751186494","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/excavating-kafka-book-james-hawes-9781849161640","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}