Description
Fiction. California Interest. Asian & Asian American Studies. Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san's interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl. Mary Caponegro says that the "verbal and the sensual are fused under [Lee's] supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy." And Norman Lock states that "Lee has written a Waste Land for our time, whose symbolic epicenter is Los Angeles; her novella is, at once, a present dystopia and an uncanny invocation of Kafka, serving time in a penal colony where consumption and its proliferating glossaries have gone mad."
Author Bio
Karen An-hwei Lee lives in greater Chicago. She is the author of the novels THE MAZE OF TRANSPARENCIES and SONATA IN K. Several of her recent poetry collections are DURESS (Cascade Books), Rose Is a Verb: Neo- Georgics (Slant Books), PHYLA OF JOY (Tupelo Press), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books).
Author City: SAN DIEGO, CA USA