Who
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novel Barn 8, and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She also runs a writing program in a maximum security prison, and she has taught Kafka in both places for decades.
The book
Three stories, each strange enough to last years. The Metamorphosis, where a salesman wakes up as vermin; “In the Penal Colony”, where an officer demonstrates a machine that writes the sentence into the skin; and “A Hunger Artist”, where a performer starves in a cage for a crowd that stops coming.
What you’ll come away with
Why a humble insurance clerk became the name for the way modern life feels, and how to read his darkest endings for the light Unferth finds in them.
