“I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound or stab us.”
Franz Kafka gave us nightmares so sharp they became metaphors. A sickly insurance clerk in Prague, he wrote about people waking up as bugs, men tried by faceless courts, and workers swallowed by endless bureaucracies. In his world, you don’t fight the system—you get smothered by it. That’s why “Kafkaesque” has become shorthand for the absurd horror of modern life.
He hardly published in his lifetime, and he begged for his manuscripts to be burned. Instead, they survived, and so did his vision: a world where guilt is arbitrary, the rules are hidden, and you’re trapped in a maze of paperwork and suspicion. Kafka’s work feels prophetic because it is—it nails the feeling of living in an age where power is invisible and suffocating. He didn’t want to be an icon, but he became one anyway: the poet of dread, the clerk who mapped our nightmares.
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