Hooray, it’s another episode of the Read Weird podcast! Join us every other week for a conversation about writing, reading, and teaching weird and experimental fiction.

In this episode, we discuss the short story “A Message from the Emperor” by Franz Kafka, and Lindsay recounts her formative experience reading Karin Tidbeck’s short story “Beatrice”.

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Weird Read of the Week
In this episode, we discussed the short story “A Message from the Emperor” by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman, which appeared in the July 1, 2011, issue of New York Review of Books. We also discussed Ian Johnston’s “The Great Wall of China“, the story which frames “Message”. The story can be found in Kafka’s Collected Stories.

Weirdest Read of All/First Weird
This week’s First Weird was the short story “Beatrice” by Karin Tidbeck, from her collection Jagganath, described by Lindsay Fowler.

Also mentioned in this episode:
N’SYNC’s “It’s Gonna Be Me“,  AM Homes’ “A Real Doll“,  “Earth Day Co-Founder Killed, Composted His Girlfriend“, “When is the unfamiliar the uncanny? Meaning affirmation after exposure to absurdist literature, humor, and art” by Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs (in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36.6, 2010), “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,  Icelandic elves, “‘From an urn already cumbled to dust’: Kafka’s use of parable and the Midrashic Mashal” by Matthew T. Powell (in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 58.4, 2006), and the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale “The Golden Key“