Laughing with Kafka

'From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in March [1998] at "Metamorphosis: A New Kafka," a symposium sponsored by the PEN American Center in New York City to celebrate the publication of a new translation of The Castle by Schocken Books.'

Harper's Magazine.

"Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal."

See Kafka, "The Metamorphosis", in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 60.