Like a lot of collections, this one can be a little hit or miss. I feel some authors may have taken the message of writing like Kafka to be weirdness for the sake of weirdness. For me, the Charlie Kaufman piece is the highlight. I enjoyed this piece so much it might be worth the price of admission by itself.

Obviously, if you're not a fan of Kafka, I think this collection probably won't be for you. But if you are, this is a wonderful contemporary spin on Kafka-type stories. Or if you're a fan of Charlie Kaufman, you'll definitely want to read this!

I received a digital advanced copy of this book in return for my honest review.

In her Introduction to A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, literary critic Becca Rothfeld notes that this collection of ten short stories was written to honour the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, explaining that many of these stories, “treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go.” I found some of these stories ironically funny, some claustrophobically intense or recognisably “Kafkaesque” in their arbitrary, indomitable bureaucracy, and some…were less successful for me. My favourites were from Elif Batuman (The Board), Keith Ridgway (The Landlord), Leone Ross (Headache), and Charlie Kaufman (This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing), and as I’ve never read anything else by these authors, I am delighted to have sampled their writing here; I’ll be looking for their novels. As for the concept behind this collection: Most of the authors used their space to make commentary on the absurdities of modern life — or the absurdity of all human interaction — and I think that for the most part, they recognisably build on Kafka’s work. It’s an interesting mix and I am happy to have picked this up.

Some dark and surprisingly humorous stories by a variety of authors that show a variety of styles and stories.