Without Franz Kafka’s papa Hermann, the term “Kafkaesque” might not exist. In one famous wintry anecdote, the father shut his young son outside on the balcony in his nightshirt for daring to ask for a glass of water. In his mid-thirties, Kafka wrote his father a 100-page “lawyer’s letter” citing years of intimidation and emotional abuse, but, true to the genre, he never sent it. For the story of another bad dad, read The Great Stork Derby, based on an actual contest in which a husband pressures his wife to have babies for cash and, fifty years later, learns the true meaning of fatherhood. Read more about the book in NOVELS.
