Un artista del hambre (título original en alemán: Ein Hungerkünstler), es un relato corto escrito por Franz Kafka en 1922 pero no fue publicado hasta 1924, después de su muerte. El protagonista es una arquetípica creación de Kafka, un individuo marginado y victimizado por la sociedad.
Une des œuvres majeures de la littérature moderne sur les cauchemars de l'existence, La transformation, ou métamorphose, de Gregor Samsa en un insecte monstrueux, semblable à un énorme scarabée, est un des jalons de la littérature universelle. Franz Kafka a écrit ce récit en 1915. Dans cette œuvre, la plus connue des cauchemars kafkaïens, le protagoniste se retrouve confronté à une réalité absurde et aliénante, symbolisant la lutte de l'individu contre un monde indifférent. La transformation de Gregor illustre les thèmes de l'isolement, de l'angoisse existentielle et de la déshumanisation. La critique souligne que l'univers de Kafka est un espace où l'homme se débat dans des situations intolérables, où la destruction de l'identité plane comme une menace inéluctable. La littérature de Kafka, à la fois cruelle et complexe, explore les profondeurs de l'âme humaine face à l'absurde et à la souffrance.
In February 1940 Franz Werfel began work on an "intricate little tale of a marriage," which, he warned his publisher, was quite a departure from his best-selling fiction of the 1930s. This new short novel was to be a tragicomic tale of contemporary history, a glimpse into a world that was soon to become inhospitable and uninhabitable. <i>Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand</i> is, in many ways, a prequel to what is known as Holocaust literature. It is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov. The evasions and self-deceptions of Werfel's characters, the various Austrian types both Jewish and non-Jewish and the pervading breathless air of anti-Semitism capture interwar Austria in its poignant eleventh hour of toleration, the heart of Werfel's subject in this twisted love story. Prior to the current NEA-award-winning translation, <i>Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand</i> was the only Werfel novel never before published in book form in English translation. Available now to a new generation of readers in America, this translation of Werfel's novella powerfully suggests that Werfel still belongs in the same company as his contemporaries Mann, Kafka, Canetti, Musil, and other Central Europeans whose works have a permanent place in the world canon.