A Hunger Artist

A hunger artist — a professional faster who performs his abstention from food for paying audiences — finds that the crowds have stopped coming. He is placed in a circus cage next to the animal stalls, and the public walks past him on their way to see the panther. He fasts. No one counts the days. And in his dying words he reveals the secret he has kept: the reason he never broke his fast was not discipline but the simple fact that he could never find any food he actually wanted to eat.

Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ is one of the most compressed and most resonant parables in world literature — a story about art and its audience, about the impossibility of communicating genuine experience, and about the particular sadness of a gift that the world no longer wants. This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers it alongside other essential late Kafka stories.

At sixty pages, one of the most concentrated introductions to Kafka’s genius — and one of the most rewarding things you can read in a single sitting. Published by Penguin.