Franz Kafka

For a handful of people, Clarice Lispector's "A Breath of Life" being published in English for the first time is very good news. Sadly, that handful is fairly small. Lispector, an extraordinarily gifted writer who revolutionized Brazilian letters, was...

Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a 100-book required reading list for his compatriots, it provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of Soviet-era censorship. The furor underscored an important point: that literature plays a...

Five years after he was first indicted and after two prosecutions ended in mistrials, a Los Angeles-based maker and distributor of niche fetish films was convicted Friday of federal obscenity charges. Ira Isaacs, who produced, sold and sometimes acted in....

Can you do a play about an invisible man? About an African-American whom others simply refuse to see? Ralph Ellison, it seems fair to surmise, thought probably not. Not well, anyway. Not something that would do justice to the moment, shortly after the end...

Opening Friday, "Carnage," director Roman Polanski's adaptation of Yasmina Reza's stage play "God of Carnage," tells the story of two sets of parents who come together to discuss an altercation involving both of their sons and descend into bitter...

Roman Polanski's "Carnage" recently opened in New York and Los Angeles. The movie is based on Yasmina Reza's play "God of Carnage." Reza recently sat down to discuss her theater career and the various versions of "God of Carnage" that have been produced...

A vast national audience rooted for Precious, the heroine of the film of that name and of Sapphire's novel "Push," as she learned to read with a dedicated teacher's help. Profoundly abused, obese, barely literate and HIV-infected, Precious set about...

“I’m not bitter,” explains the title character in the comedy “The Understudy.” In fact, he explains it repeatedly, you know, in that way that makes you doubt the truthfulness of that statement. Harry (Josh Geoghagan) has...

Among the offerings at this year's Sundance Film Festival is a documentary about a trailblazing chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who played a key role in the scientific debate over what it means to be human. The James Marsh film, "Project Nim," explores the...

"Twitterature" was created by University of Chicago students Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman who aim to re-imagine and shed insight into classic literary titles in 20 sentences of less, no more than 140 characters at a time. According to Twitterature.com...

The unbelievable turn of events pertaining to the Sun's editorial "Zero tolerance? Zero common sense" (May 10) is something so Kafkaesque that one would never believe it could happen in the good old U.S. of A. Franz Kafka's "The Trail" is a chilling...