"The Kafka Chronicles is an adventure into the psyche of an ultracontemporary twentysomething artist who is lost in an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters a cast of angry yet sensual characters: Alkaloid Boy and Blue Sky, an inconspicuous and loving couple who find themselves subjected to constant government harassment; General Psyche and his sidekick Major Uptight, the military officers responsible for controlling the media briefing room during the Gulf War; King Bohemia, a guerrilla-artist who hosts wild orgies; and, of course, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one day and finds himself living in the eco-anarchy of postmodern America. The Kafka Chronicles ignites a hyper-language that explores the relationship between style and substance, self and sexuality, and identity and difference. Amerika's energetic prose uses all available tracks, mixes vocabularies, and samples genres. Taking its cue from the recent explosion of angst-driven rage found in the alternative rock music scene, this novel reveals the unsettled voice of America's next generation". [jacket blurb, US, 1993]
"In The Kafka Chronicles, postmodernist chef Mark Amerika serves up an exotic and tasty bouillabaisse whose delightfully bizarre ingredients include succulent chunks of Leyner, Baudrillard, Kafka, Bataille, Jameson and cyberpunk all simmered in a rich sauce of nowspeak, advertising lingo and Sonic Youth lyrics not to be passed up!" --Larry McCaffery.
"Mark Amerika not only plays music -- the rhythm, the sound of his words and sentences -- he plays verbal meanings as if they're music. I'm not just talking about music. Amerika is showing us that William Burroughs came out of jazz knowledge and that now everything's political -- and everything's coming out through the lens of sexuality". --Kathy Acker.
"A remarkable book, it held me all the way. Mr Amerika -- if indeed that is his name -- has achieved a unique and startling beauty in his most artful marriage of Blake's lyricism and the iron-in-the-soul of Celine. Are we talking a new and hard-hitting Antonin Artaud? Absolutely. And much more". --Terry Southern.
"The real counterculture is not gone. Mark Amerika is proof of that... Here we have a writer who unravels his male heterosexuality as thoroughly as any post-feminist, who's willing to make disturbing accusations against mainstream culture, while simultaneously wrestling with postmodernity." -- (in The Philadelphia Inquirer ).
