The Short Fiction of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges

Franz Kafka, a German Jew living in the Czech capital of Prague, and Jorge Luis Borges, an Anglophonic Argentinian residing in the labyrinths of Buenos Aires, were the two most ambitious and experimental short story writers of the modern era. Combining surreal, speculative philosophical dreaming and dark humor with a sharp awareness of the ravages of the totalitarian century, these writers continue to be at the core of innovative literary practice in our day. We will read, in the latest translations, such works as Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,: “A Hunger Artist,” “Before the Law” and :”The Cares Of A Family Man” and Borges’s “Funes the Memorious,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Death and the Compass,” and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

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