Carter Scholz – författare

Born from the threat of nuclear weapons comes a program to build an impenetrable defence against them. The technical obstacles are enormous, the costs exorbitant, and the results dubious. Philip Quine didn't come to the Lab to work on weapons, but his expertise with X-rays leads him to Superbright, in theory an orbital battle-station to shoot down missiles, in reality little more than a spotty test data. Superbright is only the beginning, as Quine is drawn further away from the pure physics he set out to do and deeper into the machinations of those who would use the Lab for their own monetary or ideological advantage.

Previously published only in a signed, limited edition, Kafka Americana has achieved cult status. Norton now brings this reimagination of our labyrinthine world to a wider audience. In an act of literary appropriation, Lethem and Scholz seize a helpless Kafka by the lapels and thrust him into the cultural wreckage of twentieth-century America. In the collaboratively written "Receding Horizon," Hollywood welcomes Kafka as scriptwriter for Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with appropriately morbid results. Scholz's "The Amount to Carry" transports "the legal secretary of the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute" to a conference with fellow insurance executives Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, to muse on what can and can't be insured. And Lethem's "K for Fake" brings together Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, and Rod Serling in a kangaroo trial in which Kafka faces fraudulent charges. Taking modernism's presiding genius for a joyride, the authors portray an absurd, ominous world that Kafka might have invented but could never have survived.