-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
"This is a grand comic opera starring a meditative cockroach scuttling through the corridors of power at the fulcrum of the 20th century. An impressive debut, notable for a generous sense of fun."
It seems the Samsas’ chambermaid only claimed to sweep into the dustbin the twentieth century’s most remarkable contemplative. Instead, having spirited him from his bedchamber, she apparently sold the metamorphosed Gregor to a Viennese sideshow, where---it being 1915---he could earn his living lecturing carnival crowds on the implications of Rilke and Herr Spengler.
In this delightfully original work of imagination, compassion, and good reason, we follow the trajectory of Kafka’s salesman-turned-cockroach across two continents and thirty years as he touches the most significant flash points of his time. In the process, Marc Estrin delivers a human saga of cultural ambition and compassionate insight that may be the most surprising addition to Jewish literature in a generation.
What’s more, the book is funny. And Estrin’s Gregor is downright endearing.
With its reach and substance, Insect Dreams is nothing short of a liberal education---in cultural history, musical theory, nuclear physics, and the world of ideas. But it’s also a remarkable reading experience. With a scope, heart, and intelligence unparalleled in recent memory, Insect Dreams should spark wide-ranging discussions about who we’re becoming, now that the swiftest century is complete.
Frederick Reuss, author of Horace Afoot and Henry of Atlantic City
First It's funny. Second It's very funny. Third It's brilliant. Peter S. Beagle
The joy of this astonishing book - apart from its wit and its true erudition – is the tenderness with which the author treats even the least, and least worthy, of his characters. Insect Dreams is the kind of book you finish and immediately begin rereading, to see if it was really THAT good. It is. Roger Shattuck, National Book Award Winner
Against all odds, this slyly outrageous story keeps picking up momentum. It allows us to watch the most explosive events of the early twentieth century from the wings. The whole account is written in the key of---Candide, meet Dr. Strangelove. Tom Robbins
With its crazy-legged imagination, darting insights and twitchy wit, his is a creation that defies any sourpuss Raid to kill it dead.
If you liked Insect Dreams, try these:
All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well
by Tod Wodicka
Published 2009
Meet Burt Hecker - a mead-drinking, tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor from upstate New York in Tod Wodicka's debut, a modern-day Arthurian quest that introduces one of the most winning oddball characters to come along in years.
by Tyler Knox
Published 2008
It is the mid-1950s; in a fleabag hotel off Times Square Kockroach, perfectly content with life as an insect, awakens to discover that somehow he's become, of all things, a human. As Kockroach, led by his primitive desires and insectile amorality, navigates through the bizarre human realms of crime, business, politics, and sex, he meets with both ...
.gif)
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
