A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

With contributions from Ali Smith, Tommy Orange, Naomi Alderman, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway , Yiyun Li, Charlie Kaufman, Elif Batuman, Leone Ross, Joshua Cohen, and Becca Rothfeld (Introduction)