Variations in the Key of K

"Variations, in the Key of K is a collection of, materially and thematically, interconnected stories featuring half-imagined, half-scholarly, renderings of historically significant artists, including: the self-tormenting Franz Kafka, who asks that, after his death, all his writings be burned; the indomitable Pablo Picasso and the poet/journalist/art thief, Guillaume Apollinaire, who is, for a time, Picasso's shadow; the esoteric William Blake, living in poverty and neglect, who must give over pieces of his art (masterpieces that, like the paintings of Van Gogh, will one day be esteemed as so valuable, no price can be put upon them) to pay the unscrupulous doctor who attends Blake's dying wife; the obsessed, opium-fevered, Antonin Artaud, whose theater performances shock and repel, just as they magnetize and engage (a recluse, a megalomaniac, a mystic and a lunatic, respectively). The title story begins with Kafka's desire to have his writing burned (to effectively erase himself from history), then reimagines some of Kafka's complicated family dynamic, but it also engages Kafka's other life, the one in which he earns his 1912 Stockholm Olympics silver medal in javelin throw. This co