Kafka And The Doll

One year before his death Frank Kafka had an extraordinary experience. Having a walk through Steglitz Park, in Berlin, he found a little girl crying heartbroken. She had lost her doll. To calm her down Frank introduced himself as the Dolls's Postman, and told the little girl that the doll was away on a trip but had sent a letter for her that will be delivered by himself the following day. For three weeks Frank focused exclusively on the doll's letters that he handed on every day to the girl. Nobody has ever known who that little girl was and what happened with the letters.

Some of the greatest thinkers and writers of our age meditate on play and the mysteries of inanimate life. This unusual literary collection contains writings from Baudelaire, Kleist, Rilke, Freud, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Elizabeth Bishop, Dennis Silk, and Marina Warner. The essays and reflections explore the seriousness of play and the mysteries of inanimate life - 'the unknown, spaces, dust, lost objects, and small animals that fill any house' - which have provoked many writers to take the side of these dead or non-human things, resulting in some of the most profound passages in literature. The collection is introduced and edited by Kenneth Gross. On Dolls includes contributions from: Heinrich Von Kleist 'On the Marionette Theatre', Charles Baudelaire 'The Philosophy of Toys', Sigmund Freud 'The Uncanny', Rainer Maria Rilke 'On the Dolls of Lotte Pritzel', Frank Kafka 'The Cares of a Family Man', Bruno Schulz 'Tailor's Dummies', Walter Benjamin 'Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Markisches Museum', Elizabeth Bishop, 'Cirque d'Hiver', Dennis Silk 'The Marionette Theatre', and Marina Warner 'On the Threshold: Sleeping Beauties'.

Runaway children who meet up with monsters. A giant talking bug. A secret world of mouse-people. The stories of Franz Kafka are wondrous and nightmarish, miraculous and scary. In My First Kafka, storyteller Matthue Roth and artist Rohan Daniel Eason adapt three Kafka stories into startling, creepy, fun stories for all ages. With My First Kafka, the master storyteller takes his rightful place alongside Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, and Lemony Snicket as a literary giant for all ages.

"This doll's eye view is a total delight and surveys a world awash with shadowy wit and exquisite collisions of beauty and the grotesque." —Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird "Down to its most particular details, The Doll's Alphabet creates an individual world—a landscape I have never encountered before, which now feels like it was been waiting to be captured, and waiting to captivate, all along." —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be "Marvellous. Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick—it has to be both memorable and fleeting." —Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies—by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark: the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta.

Meet Poppy – if you can find her! Poppy loves bugs, and can usually be found carrying on conversations with ladybirds or sitting outside among the brightly coloured wildflowers ... but good luck spotting her indoors and around people! She's a master of camouflage, always finding a way to blend into her surroundings. But when a very special bug lands on her grandma's birthday cake, Poppy can't resist popping out to see it. Soon the rest of the guests notice the beautiful dragonfly, and Poppy too. Maybe it's OK to stand out sometimes, just like the vibrant wildflowers and shimmering insects Poppy loves. This poetic and evocative story celebrates the shy and introverted kids among us, as well as the other small creatures to be found if we look closely enough.

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Louise Belinda Bellflower lives in Rochester, New York, in 1896. She spends her days playing with her brother, Joe. But Joe gets to ride a bicycle, and Louise Belinda doesn’t. In fact, Joe issues a solemn warning: If girls ride bikes, their faces will get so scrunched up, eyes bulging from the effort of balancing, that they’ll get stuck that way FOREVER! Louise Belinda is appalled by this nonsense, so she strikes out to discover the truth about this so-called “bicycle face.” Set against the backdrop of the women’s suffrage movement, Born to Ride is the story of one girl’s courageous quest to prove that she can do everything the boys can do, while capturing the universal freedom and accomplishment children experience when riding a bike.