Anxious Pleasures A Novel After Kafka

Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surround Gregor Samsa during his plight. The hysterical mother, the stern father, the faithless sister, and their pragmatic cook all speak up here, while Olsen introduces new characters like the writer downstairs, day-dreaming the narrative he may someday compose, and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time. In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but also a celebration, augmentation, and complication of a momentously influential text.