Variations in the Key of K

Variations, in the Key of K is a collection of, materially and thematically, interconnected stories featuring half-imagined, half-scholarly, renderings of historically significant artists, including: the self-tormenting Franz Kafka, who asks that, after his death, all his writings be burned; the indomitable Pablo Picasso and the poet/journalist/art thief, Guillaume Apollinaire, who is, for a time, Picasso's shadow; the esoteric William Blake, living in poverty and neglect, who must give over pieces of his art (masterpieces that, like the paintings of Van Gogh, will one day be esteemed as so valuable, no price can be put upon them) to pay the unscrupulous doctor who attends Blake's dying wife; the obsessed, opium-fevered, Antonin Artaud, whose theater performances shock and repel, just as they magnetize and engage (a recluse, a megalomaniac, a mystic and a lunatic, respectively). The title story begins with Kafka's desire to have his writing burned (to effectively erase himself from history), then reimagines some of Kafka's complicated family dynamic, but it also engages Kafka's other life, the one in which he earns his 1912 Stockholm Olympics silver medal in javelin throw. This collection is not easy to categorize. Are these lyrical tales about the passions and excesses of artists? Is this a critical exegesis (on identity-creation and the relationship between artists and the world--and on issues of critical reception, social reputation and genius) masquerading as fantasia? For whatever it is worth, the author of this collection thinks of this collection as documents of revelation and exercises in visionary biography--

Author: Alex Stein

Publisher: Etruscan Press

Publication Date: August 11, 2020

Number of Pages: 192 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 0999753479

ISBN-13: 9780999753477