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Yes, Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. You can learn more about this Austrian (who lived in Prague) by checking out Yahoo!'s Franz Kafka category (under Authors > Literary Fiction). You'll find several well-maintained pages with Kafka stories, photographs, essays, discussion groups, and more. Of course, you can click around these sites and never quite come up with a short, clean summary of Kafka's style or themes. Some of the essays are biographical; others are related to theme but are highly specific. In order to get a short, sweet explanation of what it means to be "Kafka," we turned to some old-school
resources that are often overlooked in the information explosion that is the web-encyclopedias. Browsing the entries on Kafka found at Encyclopedia.com and Infoplease.com, we learned that Kafka's work "presents a world that is at once real and dreamlike and in which individuals burdened with guilt, isolation, and anxiety, make a futile search for personal salvation." If that weren't enough, our search at Information Please turned up a dictionary entry for the term "Kafkaesque" that draws an even sharper picture. The adjective suggests something that is "marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity." Of course, if you apply that description to Brazil, you
should probably disregard the "senseless" part, since works of art that purvey "disorienting, menacing complexity" usually know exactly what they're doing. Use the full definition in sentences like: "I was at the DMV today. It was Kafkaesque."
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