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The recent so-called scandalous revelations about Kafka's personal library (as if -- turns out he read a slightly edgy quarterly of arts & literature) prompt me to say something about his work. For my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ list, I suppose it must be this book, an inevitable choice but nonetheless indispensable (I should add, too, that I can't really specify when I read the COLLECTED STORIES; I began doing so in the 1960's & never stopped). To read Kafka is to be carried away by the imagination of the century just ended, a dream-facility which bodied forth core images of our changing condition, armed with new technologies but saddled with ancient hatreds & fears. The most famous such image, to be sure, is that of the breadwinner turned into a bug, "The Metamorphosis," & naturally that nightmare domestic comedy is in here. But this collection also has far shorter yet likewise spot-on renderings out of our developing collective unconscious, such as "A Hunger Artist," ever-more-essential reading for anyone trying to following a creative calling amid the materialist hurly-burly. More intense distillations are served, as well, in what would come to be called "flash-fic." But even at the length of a couple of pages or less, Kafka generates blinking terror & breathtaking cultural reach, in the bloody labyrinth of "A Country Doctor" or the heady blind alley of "On Parables." At every length, more's the astonishment, the rhetoric's perfectly modulated, with every correlation & description & thought given just the development, the finish, needed to serve the vision in play. Kafka insists on the primacy of that vision, never flashy, his good judgment eliminating anything that might distract, might suggest artist matters more than art. The cult of personality that's grown up around him, over the last few decades, is one of the most galling travesties of our literary culture. In Kafka's stories, the lengthiest to the most abbreviated, we are reminded that even our corrupted & shit-stained times may still be cleansed by the outflow of humanity's purest storytelling impulses.