Book Club: The Castle

Author Seth Rogoff will join the LBI Book Club in October to discuss his book The Castle.

A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel, The Castle

Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka’s world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives.

From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle.

The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.

(Review: Alabama University Press).

About Our Guest:

Seth Rogoff is a novelist and scholar of media studies, literature, and cultural analysis. He is the author of the novel The Castle (FC2 2024), a fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel. His other novels include First, the Raven: a Preface (2017), Thin Rising Vapors (2018), and The Kirschbaum Lectures (2023). With the former NBA player Kendrick Perkins, he co-authored the memoir The Education of Kendrick Perkins (St. Martin’s 2023), which explores the intersection of sports, race, history, and media. On the academic side, he published the book The Politics of the Dreamscape (Palgrave 2021), which focuses on the cultural history, literary theory, and politics of dreams and dream interpretation. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He received a MA in European Intellectual History from Duke University and a BA in the interdisciplinary program Literature and History from Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, CZ.