A dark, sometimes funny, meditation on the absurd trials of life.
A collection of bleak and amusing literary short stories from Levy.
The assorted stories in this collection tend to involve people in situations that are, in one way or another, desperate. “The Sprinter” features a nameless runner who literally exercises to death. He is engaged in “an odd form of suicide that masked itself as self-improvement.” “The Night Man” features 65-year-old Joe, who, reluctantly, retires from his position as a “night man” at an apartment complex. The story from which the book takes its title, “The Kafka Studies Department,” is about a small collection of powerless academics who study the famous author; the only one in the department with any reputation in the outside world dies rather suddenly. Many of the pieces involve well-to-do families: “Company History” is concerned with the merger of two wealthy families; “Profit/Loss” is about a power couple with a less-than-spectacular child. Both parents die in their 50s despite “all the energy they’d put into leading healthy and productive lives.” Simple black-and-white sketches by the illustrator, Cohen, add to the bleakness; “The Night Man” concludes with a drawing of the lonely exterior of Joe’s building, while “The Book of Solitude” includes an image of someone holding a volume titled The Book of Solitude. The stories in the second half of the book feature a protagonist named Spector, who spends his time mulling over the unfairness of life and preparing a hit list of people he hates. “Sleep” illustrates how Spector used to spend his weekends…sleeping. When success at his job launches him into the higher echelons of society, he is not quite sure what to do with himself. He suffers from a fear “about being discovered, about having it all taken away.”
The desperation and despair are played for laughs. When the humor succeeds, it does so in a stinging way: Those who make up the Kafka Studies department are, of course, ripe for mockery. That they have one among them who is unlike the others sets the stage. That this maverick meets a swift end is made funny by the pleasure it gives his closest rival. The rival is so passively pathetic that he ultimately removes his “Hush Puppies of the impoverished scholar” and wears the dead man’s shoes. “Profit/Loss” likewise exudes an entertaining darkness. The central couple, who have done everything right, manage to raise a boy who loves nothing more than “commercial television.” The narrator laments, “If only they could have a child they could be proud of!” If only. Other stories do not quite have the same twisted appeal. The protagonist of “The Sprinter” is as perplexing as his antics. It seems silly that he wears the same Golden Wok T-shirt every time he exercises, but his actions are more puzzling than comical. Each entry, including the installments featuring Spector, is indeed short, coming in at no more than a few pages. The prose is kept as minimal as the illustrations—at one point, Spector’s routine is described as “work, exercise, visits to his therapist.” When Spector comes into a fair amount of money, he finds that “With nothing out of his grasp, everything had lost its allure.” The book is full of such finely tuned lines, some more humorous than others.
A dark, sometimes funny, meditation on the absurd trials of life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781956474275
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Heliotrope Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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