Cantor's newest fusion of biographical fact and intuited emotion is a commanding tribute to Franz Kafka, one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary voices. In four by-turns bayoneting and tender stories, Cantor imagines the profound impact Kafka had on those closest to him, including Max Brod, his trusted friend who famously refused to burn Kafka's papers, as the dying writer requested. Percussive moral dilemmas shape each tale, most extensively in "Lusk and Marianne," in which Kafka hovers like a dark angel over the cruelly hijacked lives of his last lover, the exiled Dora Diamont; her husband, German Communist zealot Lusk Lask, who is swept into the Soviet Gulag; and their frail daughter, Marianne. Cantor also brings us to Ravensbruck, the concentration camp, where another of Kafka's beloved, the invincible translator and journalist Milena Jasenka, uplifts her sister sufferers. These fluently empathic, mordantly ironic, and unflinching stories of love, torture, and sacrifice carry forward Kafka's eviscerating vision and affirm Cantor's standing as a virtuoso writer of conscience."--Donna Seaman, " Booklist "starred review
"Four evocative, ambitious, and highly varied tales aim to bring Kafka back to us by showing that he never left. Instead, he haunts everyone and everything he touches. . . Cantor creates gripping stories around innumerable epistolary and biographical artifacts. . . .Superb."--Rebecca Schuman, "Slate"
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