If Gorey and Sendak Had Illustrated Kafka for Kids

Sylvia Plath believed it was never too early to dip children's toes in the vast body of literature. But to plunge straight into Kafka? Why not, which is precisely what Brooklyn-based writer and videogame designer Matthue Roth has done in My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs (public library) ¡½ a magnificent adaptation of Kafka for kids. With stunning black-and-white illustrations by London-based fine artist Rohan Daniel Eason, this gem falls ¡½ rises, rather ¡½ somewhere between Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, and the Graphic Canon series.

Read the full article here on Brain Pickings:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/19/my-first-kafka-roth-eason/

Matthue Roth, author of My First Kafka, was interviewed on the BBC's World Service Radio. You can listen to the whole thing by clicking on this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019y6c2

Here is Matthue's account of the interview:

I flew out to the far remote borough of Manhattan yesterday to record an interview for the BBC! They did some really cool things with it. I had a super long conversation with one of their producers, completely without knowing that they'd recorded her 7-year-old listening to (and reacting to) our version of “The Metamorphosis” being read.

Here are the oddest things about it:

a) it was in Manhattan, not London;
b) the person interviewing me was in London, and so I ended up talking to an empty chair in a completely empty room;
c) they asked me a line of questions about what my kids thought of the book, and what other kids thought of it, and then they asked a question about how Kafka's feelings about the Austro-Hungarian Empire led to his feelings of isolation. I didn't really answer that one well. Seriously, interviews make me into a deer in the headlights! Which is really odd to say, itself. I'm not used to, you know, saying “interviews” in the plural. Or being on this side of the gun. Err, the microphone.

But the producer was wonderful and Dan Damon, the host, was incredibly nice and gracious, and asked about my other books even though the interview was over and he didn't have to at all. I didn't see the real TARDIS, but I suppose they could always invite me back one day.

As a child growing up in suburban Connecticut, I was fortunate to have many books, but my favorite by far was a chestnut, leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica. I spent hours cross-legged on the carpet flipping through each volume, but I remember only the three things I repeatedly returned to: Sylvia Plath, Nostradamus, and Biafra. I read Plath's entry so many times that twenty years later I can still recite some of it verbatim. ¡ÈHorror of childbirth.¡É Self-mutilation. Oven. It was like a nightmare, and I was enraptured. While my own obsessions might have been particularly gloomy, they were no less monstrous than the adult-sanctioned books I owned. In my tiny library sat such classics as ¡ÈThe BFG,¡É by Roald Dahl, in which a girl is plucked from her bed by an ogre, and ¡ÈScary Stories to Tell in the Dark,¡É a veritable catalogue of grotesqueries accompanied by the most spine-tingling drawings I've ever seen. Another favorite was the sunny-covered ¡ÈD'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.¡É Though it looked benign, it featured the story of Cronos, who ate and regurgitated his children.

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/kafka-for-kids.html

Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires hold nary a candle to this trip. Cannonball to the moon! Hitchhike on a comet! Pah! Flitcroft and Spencer give us Einstein and interlocutor riding beams of light originating 3,200 light-years from their destination, Earth, on which, when they start out, the Trojan War rages, but which looks just like 2013 when they arrive. As they more-than-rocket onward¡½at the speed of light, you know¡½they discuss stars and atoms, the atom bomb, the big bang and microwaves, dark matter and wimps, gravity, supernovas, black holes, the history of light, quantum mechanics, relativity, space and time, planets, the sun, life, greenhouse gases, and vision, in that order and roping in plenty of subtopics en route. Avoiding confusion and condescension for the entire duration, visual physiologist and eye surgeon Flitcroft proves an ideal informant, packing the dialogue with science and just the right amount of humor to amuse without trivializing by either silliness or shortchanging the subject. An extraordinarily proficient caricaturist, Spencer makes Einstein come alive on the page in gesture and pose, and he does the same for the giants on whose shoulders Einstein says he stood¡½the likes of Newton, Galileo, and Kepler¡½when they are cited. Also, exploiting perspectival effects adroitly, Spencer makes a very verbal book zip along as if it really were astride a photon. Science comics extraordinaire!

¡½ Ray Olson

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http://www.booklistonline.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pid=6119482&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

I can think of few writers whose prose reaches that exalted state described by Mill as completely as Franz Kafka. Prodigious at evoking brutal alienation and irrevocably hopeless despair, Kafka could mold with a handful of lines what others spend countless pages failing to create ¡½ a rare case of mere words, once arranged in painstaking order, arresting the reader like an arcane incantation. In sum: no fodder for a children's book.

And yet, ¡ÈMy First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs,¡É is just such an enterprise. The book is slim, exquisitely illustrated in crisp black and white by Rohan Daniel Eason. Eason shows keen judgment, imbuing his illustrations with enough appeal and geniality to allay any fears while retaining a creeping, hardly perceptible sense of the macabre.

Read the full article here:
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/05/our-11-year-old-correspondent-reviews-my-first-kafka-runaways-rodents-and-giant-bu

With so many billboards, bus banners, and movie posters advertising Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, there's little confusion about what the film-going and literary worlds are awaiting this weekend. The impact of Luhrmann's visionary adaptation can be felt, however, far beyond the film's promotional materials. At Vogue, we're delving into novels about F. Scott's wife Zelda, exploring a reimagined suite at the Plaza hotel, and tasting specially crafted Fitzgerald ice cream flavors¡½all of which are just a few of the indications that Gatsby is having a full-fledged cultural moment.

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http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/great-gatsby-galore-what-to-eat-drink-read-and-more-to-get-ready-for-the-films-premiere/#1

Most children's books teach things like family, friends, and sharing. Franz Kafka wrote strange tales of alienation, conflict, and the meaningful meaningless of existence. That Kafka's stories could be adapted for children seems, on the surface, to be an exercise in futility. And yet, as Matthue Roth's My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Bugs (One Piece Books, 2013) demonstrates, there's a sense of childlike wonder that permeates even the strangest of Kafka's parables. That's a tricky proposition to pull off effectively – 51BeIWcvHyL._SY300_especially for Roth, who is tasked with the unenviable job of transposing Kafka's prose into child-sized morsels. Fortunately for weird kids (and their weird parents) everywhere, Roth is more than up to the task, reconstructing three of Kafka's works into the sort of stories that would fit nicely alongside the Shel Silverstein's stranger works.

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http://heebmagazine.com/kafka-4-kidz/45089

“In “Superzelda: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald,” Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta cleverly sidestep all of this by largely appropriating what she wrote about herself and what others said about her to narrate a graphic biography of her. Many of the illustrations are based on photographs of Zelda as well.”

Read the ful article here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/ct-prj-0505-zelda-fitzgerald-20130503,0,4755390.story

“Journey” is a very apt word apt to describe this work, as the reader is comfortably taken through the subject matter. Journey by Starlight gives the reader a familiar guide, too ¡½ Albert Einstein.

Einstein walks through time and space illustrating the principles and history of physics and astronomy with a single companion, an unseen narrator who plays the role of proxy for the reader and sometimes doubles as a conversation piece.

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http://io9.com/travel-with-albert-einstein-through-space-and-time-in-t-476485650

Zelda Fitzgerald just wanted to be remembered. Lo Porto says Zelda is famous in a few places in Europe, mainly those she and Scott lived, and that Woody Allen's ¡ÈMidnight in Paris¡É introduced her to a wider audience, but many people still haven't been properly introduced to Zelda Fitzgerald. A biography, love story and travelogue all in one, ¡ÈSuperzelda¡É is a fresh tribute that will appeal to even those reading a comic book for the first time.
-Deep South Magazine

Read the full article here:
http://deepsouthmag.com/2013/04/superzelda-to-the-rescue/