The Kafka Effekt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**The Kafka Effekt**

Author	D. Harlan Wilson
Cover Artist	Brandon Duncan
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Irrealism, Bizarro fiction, Postmodernism
Publisher	Eraserhead Press
Released	November 2001
Media Type	Print
Pages	211
ISBN	0971357218
Followed by	Stranger on the Loose

The Kafka Effekt (2001) is the debut book of American author D. Harlan Wilson. It contains forty-four irreal short stories and flash fiction and has been said to combine the milieu's of Franz Kafka and William S. Burroughs. Along with Carlton Mellick III's Satan Burger, Vincent Sakowski's Some Things Are Better Left Unplugged, Hertzan Chimera's Szmonhfu, Kevin L. Donihe's Shall We Gather at the Garden? and M.F. Korn's Skimming the Gumbo Nuclear, The Kafka Effekt was among the first books jointly released by Bizarro fiction publisher Eraserhead Press. Pieces in this collection orginally appeared in magazines and journals such as Redsine, Doorknobs & BodyPaint, The Dream Zone, The Dream People, Samsara Quarterly and The Café Irreal. The Kafka Effekt also includes the story "The Cocktail Party," which was adapted into a short film of the same name by graphic artist and filmmaker Brandon Duncan in 2006.

1 Table of Contents
2 Themes
3 Trivia
4 External Links
5 Interviews

[edit] Table of Contents

Warning on a Person
Boyeraqueri Bubbolifiticus's Body
Inside the Tin Man
A Description
Beneath the Husband
The Man and I
Schoolgirl Road Rage
Babyface
Feet
The Lost Item
Stagefright
Room
The Message
The Walls
Punch Line
Circus
The Professors
The Eyeballs
The Nose
The Mouths
The Chin
The Cocktail Party
Bed Head
Brain
At the Funeral
The Man in the Thick Black Spectacles
Details of a Conference Room
The Beef Tips
The Stranger in the Manhole
The Eagle-Headed Man at the Airport
Conversation with a Hair Stylist
Antiface
The Wiener Dog on the Ceiling
My Mother's Pillows
Look'd Too Near
The Truth About Humpty Dumpty
Erotic Poem
The Cape
The Book
Story on the Sphere
Hogan Marsupial
A Concern
The Equation
In Supercalifragilistic City

[edit] Themes

The Kafka Effekt is a multigeneric pastiche of absurdism, magic realism, humor, surrealism, science fiction, postmodernism, horror, the airport novel, literary fiction and bizarro fiction. Wilson's characters consistently struggle to come to terms with the ultraviolence that distinguishes their daily lives. Stories often unite the aesthetics of pop culture and literary theory.

[edit] Trivia

Wilson altered the spelling of Effect to Effekt in the title of his book not as a reference to Franz Kafka (or Kafka's protagonists Josef K. and K. in his respective novels The Trial and The Castle) but as a reference to his favorite cereal, Special K. The allusion to Kafka is merely a convenient coincidence.