Short Story Collections (Single Author), German Fiction, Alternative & Underground Comics

Give It Up and Other Short Stories

Name: Give It Up and Other Short Stories
Author: Peter Kuper
ISBN: 9781561631254

by Peter Kuper, Jules Feiffer, Kafka, Franz Kafka

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Overview

Nine paranoid tales by Franz Kafka are put to bold graphic comics.

Synopsis

Nine paranoid tales by Franz Kafka are put to bold graphic comics.

About the Author, Peter Kuper

Peter Kuper is a cofounder and editorial board member of political graphics magazine World War 3 Illustrated and a teacher who has taught at New York's School of Visual Arts and Parsons The New School for Design. Best known for drawing Mad magazine's Spy vs. Spy comic since 1997, he has also illustrated covers for Newsweek and Time magazines. He is the author of the graphic novel Sticks and Stones, which won the New York Society of Illustrators gold medal, and his autobiography, Stop Forgetting to Remember. He lives in New York City.

Biography

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The younger Kafka's feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of his work and are made explicit in his "Letter to His Father" (excerpted in this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent.

Kafka was educated in the German language schools of Prague and at the city's German University, where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka's close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod, Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his story "The Stoker" won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on The Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did appear: The Judgment (1916), The Metamorphosis (1916), The Penal Colony (1919), and The Country Doctor (1919).

Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish Kafka's writings. To this act of "betrayal" the world owes the preservation of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our century.

Biography courtesy of BN.com

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kuper (Stripped: An Autobiography in Comics) has taken on Kafka's eerily engaging short tales and captured both an impressive degree of Kafka's personal brand of existential dread, and his pervasive aura of extreme psychic alienation. In the introduction, Jules Feiffer describes Kuper's adaptations as ``riffs, visual improvisations.'' And, in many ways, Kafka's short works (most are very short; Give It Up is just 11 lines of text) function perfectly within the comics format, allowing Kuper to pace the language of Kafka's imposing visions easily against his own vibrant b&w drawings. Indeed, with slight embellishments from Kuper (for example, he renders the mouse in ``A Little Fable'' as a mouse/man), Kafka's self-punishing visions provide their own desperate imagery. Kafka's anguished archetypal characters (the murderer and victim of ``A Fratricide'' or the bullied seaman of ``The Helmsman'') are easily rendered into visual equivalents and given new life in Kuper's raw, expressionistic graphic style. His treatment of ``The Hunger Artist'' is faithful, though the condensation perhaps lacks some of the bleakly amusing ironies of the original; and ``The Trees'' (``For we are like tree trunks in the snow'') becomes a too-obvious, though poignant, allegory of urban homelessness and despair. (July)

Gordon Flagg

Comic-strip adaptations of literature are nothing new--remember Classics Illustrated?--but with the recent proliferation of graphic novels aimed at adults, they've acquired a certain legitimacy. For the latest entry in NBM's ComicsLit series, Kuper is a highly appropriate choice for interpreting nine short stories by Franz Kafka. Kuper's scratchboard style, which resembles woodcuts, is reminiscent of the German expressionist artists (Kafka's contemporaries), and his cartoony approach accentuates Kafka's dark humor while it generally avoids the pitfall of depicting Kafka's deadpan narratives too literally. The project doesn't break new ground for Kuper, however, who has previously adapted Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" and whose autobiographical "Stripped" included several unsettling dreams that resemble Kafka's waking nightmares. In his introduction, cartoonist-playwright Jules Feiffer compares Kuper's approach to jazz--" visual improvisations on short takes by the old master" --and calls Kuper's American take on alienation noisier and more raucous than Kafka's resignation. Kafka holds particular appeal for alternative comics artists: R. Crumb rendered his biography in comic strips that belong beside Kuper's adaptations on adventurous libraries' shelves.