Letters to Kafka

By Harry Greenberg

The funny, tragic, sometimes hilarious letters to a latterday Franz Kafka, whose insights into the existential dilemmas of contemporary being continue to be misunderstood, and sometimes dangerously so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CentreHouse Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370201594

Book preview

Letters to Kafka

by Harry Greenberg

The Estate of Harry Greenberg has asserted its rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988. Harry Greenberg is identified as the author of this work, apart from the Introduction. Introduction copyright © 2017, Peter Cowlam. Published by CentreHouse Press at Smashwords 2017.

Contents

Introduction

by Peter Cowlam

The Letters—

• An Unspecified Publisher

• Maurice Greunsten

• M. Herschfield

• Dogs of Today and Yesteryear

• El Frente Patriótico Nacional

• Capitan Augusto Pinochet (1)

• Capitan Augusto Pinochet (2)

• Capitan Augusto Pinochet (3)

• Capitan Augusto Pinochet (4)

• Signature Indecipherable

Endnote: The Diaries of Hermann Kafka

• Entry One

• Entry Two

• Entry Three

Other Books From CentreHouse Press

• Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?

• Across the Rebel Network

• New King Palmers

• The Vagabond Lover

• Two Plays by Garry O’Connor

• Naked Woman

• The Burghers of Ceylon

• Light in the Darkness

• Wrestling With the Angel

• Reassessing the Chesterbelloc

• The Engaged Musician

• Aggie and the Ice Floe

For more information on these and other titles visit our publisher website.

Introduction

I first met Harry at the back end of the ’90s, almost a decade after I had left the metropolis but had kept my contacts there. At that time he was still living in his flat near Highgate, where I dropped in as often as I could. Almost his entire living space was floor-to-ceiling with books and journals, some of the latter carrying short pieces Harry had written. At that time I was never shown his work in progress, which, if my memory serves correctly, was all put down using traditional pen and paper. This would now have been the early 2000s, when I never left his flat without Harry having first having filled my bag with books he thought I would like to read – a William H. Gass, one of those many enormous tomes by Harold Bloom on the subject of canonicity, Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Chevillard’s The Crab Nebula, and many, many more. I saw Harry less often once he had moved to East Finchley, but was glad to find, once he’d installed himself there, that all his writing was now through a laptop. He did not seem to understand the importance of backing up, so I bought him an offline hard drive and showed him how to use it. His scepticism wasn’t so much at the technicalities. What he was uneasy with was the thought of allowing some article of electronica into his house whose factory assembly was at the hands of slave labour working in some godforsaken sweatshop somewhere in the East. And of course, I wasn’t able to reassure him. The episode didn’t end there. On a later visit I asked him about his backups. He told me quite calmly he had lent the hard drive I had brought him to a great nephew, for use with a compter game, but since its return it had never worked. I looked at it, and yes, it was quite dead. By now storage technology had moved on, to a point of greater and greater capacity crammed onto smaller and smaller devices. I bought a couple of USB sticks, and personally backed up Harry’s machine – once on a stick I