Cage Went in Search of a Bird by Ali Smith

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka – published to commemorate the centenary of his death

*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, Esquire and the New European*

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka – to commemorate one hundred years since his death

About the Author: The authors in this book have won prizes including The Women’s Prize for Fiction, the American Book Award, an Academy Award, multiple BAFTAs and the Writers Guild of America Award; and they have been shortlisted for prizes including the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. From countries including China, the USA, Ireland and the UK, and living now in cities around the globe from Prague to New York City, the authors represent how far-reaching Kafka’s influence is across the world.

30 May 2024
 

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories by Ali Smith ISBN 9780349146416