Behold! The cover of my next book, The Kafka Sutra, due out this fall from MadHat Press. The title sequence is one of the odder things I've done—a rewriting of the Kama Sutra as if Kafka had written it; or a rewriting of Kafka's parables as an ancient Sanskrit sex manual. Accompanying the series are artworks by Sarah Conner, such as this:
Thanks to Sarah; and to Moxie (the scariest belly-dancer in Chicago) for modeling for the cover; to Kriss Abigal for her amazing photo, and to Valerie for work on the layout. This is my favorite cover yet among my books, in part because the "belly dancer in a top hat" look captures something of both Kafka and the Kama Sutra.
Also, thanks to the great David Kirby, who says this on the back of the jacket:
I’m pretty sure I was the only one reading poetry as I waited for my car to be serviced, but certainly I was the one who rocked the other customers out of their torpor with a belly laugh – not an unrelated occurrence, since I was reading Robert Archambeau’s addictive poems and had just gotten to the one in which men are told they can either become a husband or the lover of another man’s wife; naturally they all choose the second option, and the result is that soon there are no more wives. Then again, a rich irony suffuses all these poems. If you’re heading to the dealership and are looking for brainy, funny lines delivered with a rueful sigh, The Kafka Sutra is definitely the book for you.And the immortal Andrei Codrescu, who says:
Archambeau has found the cartilage that keeps the body flexible and life Kafkaesque by inventing a musical technique that keeps life’s surging anarchy personalized through the universally usable Kama Sutra. I’m using it right now!And to the gracious Maxine Chernoff, who writes:
Reading Robert Archambeau's vastly engaging book, The Kafka Sutra, I feel as if I have gone on several vacations, a safari, and a trip into imaginative space: his far-ranging mind "riffs on, or remixes, replies to, or makes deeply unfaithful translations of what others have written." The book has sound, technique, wit, grace, staggering inventiveness, and above all generosity: from supplying Kafka with a deeply sexualized "new" body of work to celebrating luminaries from David Bowie to John Milton it is all splendidly here, in aces.And, last but by no means least, to Wendy Doniger, Sanskrit scholar, Kama Sutra translator, and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago who, after reading The Kafka Sutra, said:
Archambeau’s absolutely hilarious Kama Sutra spoof made me howl with laughter!MadHat Press is to be held responsible for my crimes against literature.
