A father tries to stave off a nervous breakdown when a family trip to SeaWorld shades into the sinister; a porn critic discovers that, despite his best intentions, his reputation—not to mention the stacks of smut lining his apartment—precedes him; an out-of-work avant-garde stage director begins to test his limits in the theater of life; desperate forgotten comic book characters find themselves suddenly stranded on a desert island. With his celebrated wit and invention, Lethem brilliantly transforms the real into the surreal, uncovering the absurdity always lurking in the mundane, the twin forces of humor and tragedy that bracket experience, and the lasting desire—even in the face of all that goes awry—for human connection.

In an act of literary appropriation by turns witty, affectionate, and shameless, Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz seize a helpless Franz Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as a scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a professional conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, for a night of musing on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial where Kafka faces, needless to say, fraudulent charges. Taking Modernism's presiding genius for a literary joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived. Book jacket.

A short story collection by the author of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE and MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. Limited to only 1500 copies.