What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming, epigrammatic memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s, a time when "if it hadn't been for books, we would have been completely at the mercy of sex." The speaker is Anatole Broyard, a dapper, earnest, and fledgling avant-gardist who would go on to become a leading book critic for The New York Times.

We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street -- indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as "living off the land or sailing around the world" -- while exercising his libido with a protégé of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on "the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.

Media Reviews:

"Full of Broyard's wit, compassion and rich insight.... His mind, his aesthetic, his view of the world shimmer brightly in this memoir."
--Chicago Tribune

"Seductive, ardently written...a valentine with barbs."
--Washington Post Book World

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