Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka

This novel re-imagines The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning as a bug. Samsa’s point of view is crucial to The Metamorphosis, but Lance Olsen focuses on those who witness the inexplicable, unsettling transformation: his sister, his parents, the chief clerk, the servant girl, the cook, the charwoman, and three lodgers. Anxious Pleasures expands the story to these peripheral characters and ones who never even met the new Samsa: a cashier who he casually dated, his sister’s suitor, and the neighbor downstairs.