Latest Franz Kafka Stories

Reading a book by Franz Kafka "“"“ or watching a film by director David Lynch "“"“ could make you smarter.According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers' findings appear in an article published in the September issue of the journal...

Few instincts are so strong or so widely shared as the urge to condemn other people for their sexual idiosyncrasies. And yet, argues Howard Jacobson, it is when we explore the outer boundaries of our sexual desires that we become most fully human "We are all sick in our own way," Felix Quinn declares. Felix Quinn is the hero of my new novel, The Act of Love, and he, admittedly, has an axe to grind. He is a cuckold and he likes it. His idea of a good time is lying lonely in his bed, knowing...

By MARK SHECHNER Past efforts to translate Philip Roth's books into film have produced one dog after another. They include Larry Peerce's "Goodbye Columbus" (1969), Ernest Lehman's gagfest "Portnoy's Complaint" (1972) and Robert Benton's dreary "The Human Stain" (2003). It isn't reassuring that Nicholas Meyer, screenwriter for "The Human Stain," is at it again with "Elegy," the latest effort to domesticate the ferocious Roth for popular film. But then the novel "The Human Stain" was so...

By Lawson Taitte, The Dallas Morning News Jul. 27--One of the Festival of Independent Theatres' problems is coming up with good material. Apparently, the list of first-rate one-acts is not endless, as the two final entrants in the 2008 festival demonstrate. If the name of the distinguished American playwright William Inge arouses expectation of deep drama, A Murder will disappoint. This little piece might remind you of a weaker episode of The Twilight Zone, if it's not a weak parody of...