A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

Ten Kafkaesque Stories

By: Tommy Orange, Ali Smith, Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Charlie Kaufman, Leone Ross, Joshua Cohen

Narrated by: Penelope Rawlins, Matt Reeves, Jessica Hayles, Minhee Yeo

What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment.

From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.