John Kessel

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

I don't know if this is a stumbling block, but I had a real setback when I won a Nebula Award for the first story I ever had nominated for a Nebula in 1982. And you might think that was a good thing - and it was a wonderful thing, I don't regret it a bit. But I was sort of discombobulated by it.

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.

One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.