Introducing Kafka

 Over at the Scratch Books website, I attempt the impossible task of briefly introducing Franz Kafka through his brilliant short story Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.

As a suggestion, if you're looking for an attractive edition of the story, try the one illustrated by David Musgrave, published as part of the Four Corners Familiars series.

Ditlevsen & Lewis

A couple more recent appearances on the mighty Shawn's Youtube channel recently, discussing the brilliant Danish writer and suicide Tove Ditlevsen, plus a certain recovered classic :

Click through for actually not-tiny full-screen versions!

50 MORE Short Excellent Books You Can Read in One Hit in Isolation

(A follow-up to this post, derived from this thread...)

51. AN OBSCURE MAN: Marguerite Yourcenar
Astonishingly convincing novella about a 17th-Century Dutchman, his travels, his loves and his failures. Found in this collection (also available as 'Two Stories and a Dream'), with its equally successful sequel novella, A LOVELY MORNING.

52. SICKLE: Ruth Lillegraven
Verse novel encapsulating the whole life of a Norwegian man in the 1800s, and the life of the woman who is unlucky enough to marry him. Big themes, done with a delicately light touch.

53. AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE: W F Hermans
It's the arse-end of WW2, you're an exhausted partisan fighting in the wreckage of Germany, and you find a beautiful, empty untouched house, an oasis of peace. What would you do to keep it for yourself?

54. BLIND HUBER: Nick Flynn
Blind beekeeper, beekeeper's assistant, the hives of bees: all have their own voices in this wonderful connected collection of poems

55. BRUGES-LA-MORTE: Georges Rodenbach
A creepy, decaying city hosts a creepy, decaying man in mourning as he sinks into sexual obsession and murderousness. What's not to like?

56. HIGHWAY WITH GREEN APPLES: Bae Suah
A novella about a near-affectless young artist adrift in Seoul, switching seamlessly through different times of her life. Perhaps more straightforward than Suah's longer works, but showing most of her preoccupations and strengths.

57. ADDRESS UNKNOWN: Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
A very effective and nastily stinging brief novella of betrayal and revenge, told entirely through letters. One of the books which warned of the dangers of the Nazis and was inevitably ignored by the people who should have listened.

58: THE MEMOIR OF AN ANTI-HERO: Kornel Filipowicz
Passivity, resistance and collaboration in WW2 Poland; what is your life worth?

59. THE STRANGE CASE OF EDWARD GOREY: Alexander Theroux
A perfect argument for why there should be more brief biographies of eccentric people by masterful novelists.

60. NESS: Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood
Rich and strange and incantatory and ominous and Bomb-shadowed. A terrible Black Mass is brewing, and five THINGS are coming across the sea to stop it.

61. MRS CALIBAN: Rachel Ingalls
Just a perfect little novel about a neglected suburban housewife who falls in love with a swampy sea monster.

62. BOX HILL: Adam Mars-Jones
Incredibly uncomfortable, weirdly comic novella about love, sex, and being used and abused. Alarming and excellent.

63. PEREIRA DECLARES: Antonio Tabbucchi
(also published as PEREIRA MAINTAINS) Salazar's Portugal, a man trying to stand above the fray, a politicised encounter, a wonderful voice

64. THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND: Anne Carson
Jealousy and sex and beauty and love filtered through the prism of Keats, in the form of a verse novella

65. RED SHIFT: Alan Garner
Dialogue-driven linked stories of people on the run in three widely separated timezones (Roman Britain, English Civil War, 1970s) near the hill/castle/town of Mow Cop; strange and mad and wonderful

66. PLEASE, SIR!: Frigyes Karinthy
Genuinely hilarious Hungarian satire on school life from the pupils' point of view. Impossible to find copies, but available online here.

67. THE UNION JACK: Imre Kertész
Another Hungarian, much less funny, but still wonderful: a man glimpses the Union Jack in the midst of the 1956 uprising, and it unleashes a contemplative mental spiral as the Soviet army prepares to invade.

68. AUGUST: Christa Wolf
An orphaned young boy in a TB sanatorium in the winter of 1946, written in a single day. An absolute gem, perfectly polished.

69. NOMADS: Dave Hutchinson
A group of people secretly living among us who are refugees from... something. A witty and clever example of why novellas are often the ideal length for science-fiction.

70. SEVERINA: Rodrigo Rey Rosa
A bored bookseller falls in love/lust/obsession with a sexy young book thief. AND WHY WOULDN'T YOU?

71. BULLFIGHT: Yasushi Inoue
American-occupied postwar Japan, and the editor of a relatively sophisticated Osaka newspaper gets mixed up in a scheme by a crime figure to organise a bullfight tournament.

72. FAUST: Ivan Turgenev
How things can go wrong when trying to seduce a married woman by reading her Goethe's 'Faust' when that's one of the things her husband JUST WON'T DO. Books will ruin your life.

73. THE RED SOFA: Michèle Lesbre
A woman on the way to Siberia, caught in a web of memories and emotions involving two old loves (one dead, one incommunicado), an old lady in her Parisian apartment, and the Russian landscape.

74. ON A RED STATION, DRIFTING: Aliette de Bodard
There aren't many extremely subtle novels of manners set on a space station in an alternative future where Vietname and China established Confucian galactic empires, and on this evidence that is a real shame.

75. THAT SMELL: Sonallah Ibrahim
Modernist, semi-existentialist goodness about a recently released political prisoner roaming Cairo, lost in the changing Egypt, and spying on his neighbours while under house arrest.

76. THE EMBALMER: Anne-Renée Caillé
Fragmented, oddly sweet story of someone interviewing her funeral worker father to capture all of his weird stories and strange workplace advice.

77. AMPHIBIAN: Christina Neuwirth
The old story: you come to work; management slowly floods the workplace to improve productivity (improve sales or drown)

78. GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER: Caroline Blackwood
An absolutely monstrous matriarch rules over her house and her family in this pitch-perfect black comedy of nastiness in an Anglo-Irish Big House.

79. WITTGENSTEIN'S NEPHEW: Thomas Bernhard
Strange and sometimes almost sweet fictionalised memoir of the time a young Bernhard shared a hospital with his friend Paul, a nephew of Wittgenstein; Bernhard for his endlessly knackered lungs, Paul for mental illness

80. MINE-HAHA: Frank Wedekind
Pleasingly mental tale of a deeply weird boarding school for girls that focuses entirely on bodily movement before releasing its charges entirely ill-equipped into the adult world

81. THE NIGHTMARE OF A VICTORIAN BESTSELLER: Brian Thompson
Funny, scathing brief biography of the first book of self-help pablum and its faintly ridiculous author

82. LOIS THE WITCH: Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell goes full-on Gothic in a bleak novella based on the Salem Witch Trials

83. THE TIDINGS OF THE TREES: Wolfgang Hilbig
The narrator surveys the ashy wasteland, haunted by the grisly "garbagemen", in this bleak novella of repressed history and the permanence of decay

84. HIS MOTHER'S HOUSE: Marta Morazzoni
A garden in Norway, the love and life's work of Haakon's mother. But now she has a young assistant, Felice, and Haakon is being pushed aside. The quietest power struggle in literature ensues.

85. ADVENTURES IN IMMEDIATE IRREALITY: Max Blecher
One of Blecher's several small masterpieces, a fictionalisation of his youth full of terrifying, visionary premonitions

86. THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS: Ted Chiang
Weirdly touching novella about consciousness, a sort of parenthood, AI and independence; available in the excellent EXHALATION collection.

87. CADAVER DOG: Luke Best
Grim as grim verse novel about a massive flood and its psychological toll on a woman who stays put in her mostly submerged house

88. RIPENING SEED: Colette
The ultimate young-love-going-sour-but-also-French novel, one of her many compact masterpieces, almost all of which are shamefully out of print in English because we are unworthy

89. NOSTALGIA HAS RUINED MY LIFE: Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
Extremely funny, extremely uncomfortable fragmented diary-like tale of a year in a NZ woman's ill-considered life

90. THE FISH GIRL: Mirandi Riwoe
Riwoe fleshes out a minor Malay character from one of Somerset Maugham's 'Far Eastern Tales', giving her a richly textured history and tragic life story

91. THE SERVANT: Robin Maugham
See a man thoroughly manipulated, debased and destroyed! Lots of dark, seedy fun about power plays and switching roles.

92. LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK: Nikolai Leskov
A servant embarks and what to him is just another affair with a married woman, not realising the emotional storm and violence he's about to unleash. The title will give you some hints.

93. THE BROTHER: Rein Raud
A stranger comes to town. All hell breaks loose.
(A deliberate attempt to do an Estonia "spaghetti Western", this succeeds in every way.)

94. TODAY: David Miller
Forster-channelling novella about the death of Joseph Conrad; beautifully observed only book by a writer who then sadly died himself.

95. JILLIAN: Halle Butler
Deeply grim and funny workplace comedy about a terrible employee in a terrible workplace and her obsession with/loathing of her even more terrible office-mate.

96. THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER: Joseph Roth
Strange, wondrous story of transcendence about a man drinking himself to death, written by a genius in the process of drinking himself to death

97. EVERY EYE: Isobel English
A woman on a train unravels the mystery of her life; a compact masterpiece admired by Muriel Spark, who was no stranger to compact masterpieces

98. TRAVEL LIGHT: Naomi Mitchison
Weird, vivid fairy-story-ish fantasy of exiled children, talking shapeshifting animals and the language of dragons.

99. THALIAD: Marly Youmans
An origin story--a verse saga--of some future civilisation, drawn from the story of a group of children who (mostly) survive the fiery catastrophe that destroys ours.

100. THE DUEL: Giacomo Casanova
Ending this list with a second duel, this time in an autobiographical novella about two men (exiled Venetian, polish aristocrat) who end up in a battle of honour over a woman neither of them actually likes

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