Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka - Softcover

Wilson, William S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880010703 ISBN 13: 9780880010702

Publisher: Ecco Pr, 1984

Synopsis

This classic collection of short fiction by William S. Wilson touches on controversies over the role of science in our lives and deals with cosmetic surgery and the medical uses of human embryos, heart transplants, and regenerated genitalia. And that's only the beginning. The story "Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka," implies that Kafka responded in his fiction to questions that no longer need to be asked in fiction. The epistolary story, "Conveyance: The Story I Wouldn't Want Bill Wilson to Read," is an intimate letter from a woman who had wanted to write fiction and who now challenges Wilson's reaction to her report of a tragedy. "Interim" chronicles the imaginary reforestation of Scotland and "Anthropology" turns on the actual moment in Structuralism when Claude Levi-Strauss relocates the ear to the back of the head in order to interpret a myth.

About this title

From the Publisher

Wilson's story anthropology, what is lost in rotation, which appears in this collection, was published in the Best American Short Stories 1977 edition.

From the Back Cover

Many of the stories in Why I Don't Write like Franz Kafka turn on physical operations in a possible future when regeneration of organs is possible. Others reflect intellectual operations as abstract as logic, with adaptations of both Kurt Goedel's Undecidability Theorem and Bertrand Russell's Paradox in set theory. The titles are set in lower case, as in a dictionary, with physical and intellectual actions defining the concept in the title.

The story "metier: why I don't write like Franz Kafka," implies that Kafka responded in his fiction to questions about divine laws that no longer need to be asked in fiction. The epistolary story, "conveyance: the story I wouldn't want Bill Wilson to read," is an intimate letter from a woman who had wanted to write fiction. She writes to challenge Wilson's complacencies with her report of a tragedy which is beyond consolations and the coherence of art. The story, "interim," chronicles the imaginary reforestation of Scotland, while "anthropology" turns on the actual moment in Structuralism when Claude Levi-Strauss relocates the ear to the back of the head in order to interpret a myth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Pr
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0880010703
• ISBN 13: 9780880010702
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 134