Kafka

One sleepless night, in the near future, adolescent Joan (Laila Kearney) informs her aunt that something untoward has occurred outside. "Now what did you imagine you saw in the dark?" Aunt Harper (Beth Hogan) clucks. Her chipper facade conceals panic; she knows her niece witnessed an unspeakable waking nightmare. She dissembles: "It is like a person screaming when you hear an owl." Thus begins the hourlong descent into grotesque chaos that is "Far Away."

Name your favorite, the one book that most sticks in your mind. Over nearly four years, photographer Catherine Wagner made that request of friends, acquaintances and outright strangers. She kept a tally on her iPhone and turned the top vote-getters into the spine of her latest work, "trans/literate," an homage to books - the cardboard and paper sort that some predict won't survive the 21st century. The list of titles and authors reads like an exceptionally weighty version of English 101. "Most people went back to their teenage years, to high school or college," Wagner said.

Miriam Katin's “Letting It Go” (Drawn & Quarterly: 160 pp., $24.95) is my kind of graphic memoir: loose, impressionistic, a portrait of the artist's inner life. Keyed by the decision of her adult son Ilan to take up permanent residence in Berlin, it is, in part, the story of her coming to terms, at long last, with her legacy as a survivor of the Holocaust. But without minimizing this part of the story, “Letting It Go” is much more than that - a meditation on love, on family, and an inquiry into art. Functioning in some sense as a sketchbook, Katin's story is delightfully open-ended, less a look back at a particular situation than a series of reflections from the trenches of her life as it is lived.

Miriam Katin's “Letting It Go” (Drawn & Quarterly: 160 pp., $24.95) is my kind of graphic memoir: loose, impressionistic, a portrait of the artist's inner life. Keyed by the decision of her adult son Ilan to take up permanent residence in Berlin, it is, in part, the story of her coming to terms, at long last, with her legacy as a survivor of the Holocaust. But without minimizing this part of the story, “Letting It Go” is much more than that - a meditation on love, on family, and an inquiry into art. Functioning in some sense as a sketchbook, Katin's story is delightfully open-ended, less a look back at a particular situation than a series of reflections from the trenches of her life as it is lived.

At first I thought it might be Kafka I was reading, then it struck me. It was the best definition of Hell I'd read in years: "Who would think to go into a field of employment in which a certain level of training and skill is at the same time mandatory and immaterial?" The light shed in Lawrence Christon's article ("So Many Actors, So Few Roles," Nov. 15) was at once heartbreaking and perfectly true. AL ALU, actor Los Angeles

This is how the justice system used to work in this country: Debtors were routinely locked up. Peasants could spend decades in prison for stealing and eating a cow. Suspects languished eight years behind bars awaiting a verdict, were found innocent, then had to remain in prison while prosecutors appealed--sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court.

Name your favorite, the one book that most sticks in your mind. Over nearly four years, photographer Catherine Wagner made that request of friends, acquaintances and outright strangers. She kept a tally on her iPhone and turned the top vote-getters into the spine of her latest work, "trans/literate," an homage to books - the cardboard and paper sort that some predict won't survive the 21st century. The list of titles and authors reads like an exceptionally weighty version of English 101. "Most people went back to their teenage years, to high school or college," Wagner said.

Clinging to cliches like continuity of plot and character will only get you in trouble at Eugene Ionesco's "Victims of Duty," especially given Frederique Michel's full-throttle staging for Santa Monica's City Garage. The signature non sequiturs, jarring emotional shifts and irrational behavior in the Romanian-born playwright's 1952 absurdist farce remain perplexing and disturbing to this day.

The King of Kahel Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French Nicholas Elliott Amazon Crossing: 289 pp., $13.95 paper It's "The Little Prince" with a hint of "Curious George" and a smidgen of "Gulliver's Travels. " Based on the real life of 19th century explorer Olivier de Sanderval, this novel travels outward from the dreams of an 8-year-old boy who would be king. When he gets old enough to make his dreams reality, Olivier departs, at age 40 in 1879, from the port of Marseille, France, to colonize his corner of Africa, Fouta Djallon.

Can I trust you with a secret? I'm hooked on reruns of "The Fugitive," the classic television series (1963-67) starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, "unjustly convicted . . . " Weekdays, 7 a.m., Arts & Entertainment channel. My son Michael and I watch while having breakfast. I explain to Michael the symbolic use of light and dark, the moral ambiguity, the analogues to the pessimism of Kafka and Gide. Michael nods. Did I tell you that he's 7 months old?

Franz Kafka hardly conjures a light, romantic image. But a summer tour of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic highlights the love affair between the author and the little-known Dora Diamant. The story unfolds in the streets of Prague,  Czech Republic, where the German author was born, moves to the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, Poland, where Diamant organized plays and ends in Berlin, where the couple lived the Bohemian life in the early 1920s. Kathi Diamant (no relation), who wrote the book "Kafka's Last Love" and heads the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, leads the Magical Mystery Literary History Tour that includes meeting with Kafka scholars and descendants of Dora Diamont too. Proceeds from the trip support the nonprofit Kafka Project, which seeks to recover lost letters, journals and notebooks by the author.

The King of Kahel Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French Nicholas Elliott Amazon Crossing: 289 pp., $13.95 paper It's "The Little Prince" with a hint of "Curious George" and a smidgen of "Gulliver's Travels. " Based on the real life of 19th century explorer Olivier de Sanderval, this novel travels outward from the dreams of an 8-year-old boy who would be king. When he gets old enough to make his dreams reality, Olivier departs, at age 40 in 1879, from the port of Marseille, France, to colonize his corner of Africa, Fouta Djallon.

Meeks A novel Julia Holmes Small Beer Press: 190 pp., $16 paper The meek shall inherit the earth, the Bible tells us, but all they get in Julia Holmes' debut novel, "Meeks," is a life of grim servitude. Set in an allegorical city-state that could be any Western nation with a taste for warfare, statuary and civic-minded totalitarianism, "Meeks" is a prayer for the doomed that reads like a comedy. The hero of this land is one Captain Meeks, whose statue presides over the park where the annual Founders Play takes place.

It's always tricky when an author's name becomes an adjective. Orwellian, Machiavellian, Faulknerian -- these designations make it hard to see a writer on his or her own terms. This is perhaps most true of Franz Kafka, whose sobriquet, Kafkaesque, has become a catchall for the weird and inexplicable. Yet 84 years after his death of tuberculosis at age 40, Kafka continues to defy such simplifications, to force us to consider him anew.

May we please stop obsessing over the hypoallergenic first puppy and change the subject to something deep, spiritual, life-changing? Like detergent. Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama, appearing with his wife, Michelle, on "60 Minutes," spoke of household chores. He doesn't, he admitted, volunteer to wash dishes, but he washes them. And when he does, he said, he tries to use that as therapeutic practice, to find something soothing in the discipline.

Ever claustrophobic, Kafka could not stomach big words. "If uttered by a young woman, breathlessly," the marvelous Italian writer Roberto Calasso notes in his magisterial recent study of the writer, "he had the impression that they emerged 'like fat mice from her little mouth.' " That image alone should be enough to scare composers away from setting Kafka texts, what with music's fondness for fattening every syllable.

Newsday reports that the royalties department of Random House recently sent a letter to a London publisher that said, in part: "Dear Author: Our records indicate we are missing your Social Security number or taxpayer identification number. In order to avoid penalties imposed by the IRS. . . ." The letter was addressed to Franz Kafka. Random House called it "a computer mistake."

Lest readers fall prey to either the "Intentional Fallacy" and assign authorial intent where there was none, or to mere confusion arising from The Times staff's misleading headline, "He Dreamed He Was a Cockroach," which appeared above D. M. Thomas' review of Frederick Karl's "Franz Kafka: Representative Man" (Nov. 17), it is only fair to set the record straight. It was Kafka's short-story character, Gregor Samsa, in "The Metamorphosis" and not Kafka the author who awoke to find himself transformed into a giant insect.

WHEN Franz Kafka's "The Trial" appeared posthumously in the 1920s, the German satirist and critic Kurt Tucholsky remarked that most books let a reader know what he is dealing with early on, but "[h]ere you know nothing, you grope in the dark. What is this? Who is that?" In the course of Reiner Stach's "Kafka: The Decisive Years" -- at almost 600 pages it is the first volume of what clearly will be a massive trilogy -- readers may find themselves in a similar perplexity.

On April 2, this city celebrated the 200th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen with an extravaganza called "Once Upon a Time" that featured the likes of Tina Turner and Renee Fleming and was broadcast throughout Europe. Danish politicians were outraged at the tacky image of their country it projected. One member of Parliament likened the stadium show to a cheap, second-class copy of "Holiday on Ice." The minister of culture has been called on the carpet.