The Latest Breaking News from Franz Kafka

Editorial: The real culture war is the battle to fund it properly, in the face of politicians bemoaning a lack of money

The forking paths and opaque traps of his writings might sound amenable to gaming. But the meaningful futility of his fiction doesn’t add up to much here

Somebody must have laid false information against [him], for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.

There is a rather potent image of failure which recurs in the short stories and novels of Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who died of tuberculosis 100 years ago. The image is of a young man brimming with self-assurance who, without warning, is assailed by some irreproachable authority. He protests,…

A hundred years after his death, the author’s presence is as strong as ever in the Czech capital – from his childhood homes and the literary cafes he frequented to the remarkable buildings immortalised in his work

Letter to friend and publisher Albert Ehrenstein, to be auctioned in June, details struggle to write at time of tuberculosis diagnosis

A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

Throughout his work, Franz Kafka depicts bodies disabled by the exhausting effects of the workplace. In Amerika (1911 to 1914), set in an era of early 20th-century free-market enterprise, Kafka portrays the gruelling consequences of overwork on desperate people.

I began teaching Stanley Kubrick in 2007 shortly after I moved to Bangor University. In 2012, I embarked on a research project exploring what I called Kubrick’s ethics, ethnicity and archives. It was during that research, which was published as Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual in 2018, that I…

To mark the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, three compelling books – including his unedited diaries – reveal the complexity of the author’s works and why ‘Kafkaesque’ is so reductive