Give It Up! and Other Short Stories

(NBM, 1995)
™ and © NBM

Peter Kuper’s idiosyncratic style is a surprisingly nice match for Franz Kafka’s absurd, claustrophobic tales of paranoia and dismay. Kuper uses simplified exaggeration to realize the waking nightmare of Kafka’s tales of persecution and mazelike bureaucracy.

Here, unspecified authorities become literally faceless entities whose expressions, nonetheless sadistic and vicious, betray nothing of their thoughts, but reflect the viewer’s own fears and guilt back at him. In one tale, a pistol-nosed policeman bullies a poor traveler whom he ought to help. In another, a random murder occurs as much because of a gawking bystander’s unwillingness to help as the killer’s unmotivated attack.

In this collection of stories, it’s as though the whole world where a Russian revolution poster, and Kuper the cartoonist who caricatures it. What was amazing about Kafka was his vision of conspiracy, injustice and fascism before it was realized on the political stage. Kuper’s art fits just that vision.

— Brendan McGinley

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Notes

Writer

Artist

#1

July, 1995
Cover Price: $8.95
1 copy available for $12.00

Franz Kafka

Peter Kuper