"Life is merely terrible"

Despite my resolve to write review-essays, here's another news and chat post.

Since Amazon UK has reinstated the Publication Date filter on its search engine, I've been looking for forthcoming books of note. First up is Louis Begley's The Trememdous World I Have Inside My Head, a "biographical essay" on Franz Kafka. Great title. Of course, it comes from Kafka's Diaries. Peter Mailloux used one from there too for his 1989 biography A Hesitation Before Birth. Even better. Publishers Atlas & Co offer a PDF of a sample chapter "Life is Merely Terrible", a line from his letters to Felice.

Imagine a library made up only of books with titles taken from Kafka. I open the Diaries at random: "The unimaginable sadness in the morning". Autobiography.