“‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a TikTok sensation.’ This is not – blessedly – how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins. But almost exactly a century after his death, the Bohemian writer would be astonished to find that not only had his friend and literary executor Max Brod disobeyed his instructions and published works of his that included The Trial and The Castle, but that he had become, of all things, a social media sensation.” “Space and good taste do not allow me to fully reproduce the excitement with which the young have taken an interest in Kafka.” “Writers throughout the ages have often attracted sighing attention for their looks as much as their books. There was perhaps no more notorious example than the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Lord Byron, who cut a swath through early 19th-century literary London, besieged by women (and men) desperate to make his acquaintance and more. Many succeeded. The most persistent of these would-be lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, went to drastic lengths to secure Byron’s attentions, including turning up at his lodgings dressed as a boy and sending him clippings of her pubic hair stained with blood, where she had cut too deeply. The relationship, unsurprisingly, did not work out, and Lamb later took her revenge by writing a roman à clef entitled Glenarvon, in which Byron was portrayed as the eponymous, vampiric character of whom it is said ‘[his] love is death’.” —”Stop turning dead authors into sex symbols. Kafka has become an unlikely social media heart-throb – and he’s not alone.”

Also “Like circus-goers marveling at a heap of bones in the straw, TikTokkers have been come upon the mortified works of Franz Kafka and found themselves overcome with *checks notes* lust.”—”TikTok has awoken and found itself with a mad crush on Kafka.”