Mash-Up

Platzová’s new novel has been published to coincide with the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death. Kafka fans and more will delight in this imagined life of his first real love, Felice Bauer, to whom the collection Letters to Felice refers. Felice fled Nazi Berlin with her family after meeting Kafka in 1912 in Prague. Their letters take place over a mere five years, but it was a defining relationship for both. Platzová has taken a deep dive to research the story of Felice’s life, with the blessing of her descendants. Combining fact and fiction, she illuminates the woman, the era, and Kafka himself.

Vietnamese American Nao’s work has always combined media—poetry, art, and film. In her new book, set in the underbelly of Las Vegas, our anonymous narrator writes letters to her Italian lover. Queer, erotic, stylistically experimental, this fiction is even more powerful because the growing letter is never sent. The outpouring of emotion, her attraction to the decadent Las Vegas desert (“for its bright lights and its angels of darkness”), frustration with her stalled academic career, devotion to her declining mother—all remain one-sided, diary-like, while the reader wonders about the Italian poet in London who has claimed her passion.