© Photographer: Katharena Eiermann Agency: Dreamstime.com

Give It Up: And Other Short Stories From Publishers Weekly Kuper (Stripped: An Autobiography in Comics) has taken on Kafka's eerily engaging short tales and captured both an impressive degree of Kafka's personal brand of existential dread, and his pervasive aura of extreme psychic alienation. In the introduction, Jules Feiffer describes Kuper's adaptations as "riffs, visual improvisations." And, in many ways, Kafka's short works (most are very short; Give It Up is just 11 lines of text) function perfectly within the comics format, allowing Kuper to pace the language of Kafka's imposing visions easily against his own vibrant b&w drawings. Indeed, with slight embellishments from Kuper (for example, he renders the mouse in "A Little Fable" as a mouse/man), Kafka's self-punishing visions provide their own desperate imagery. Kafka's anguished archetypal characters (the murderer and victim of "A Fratricide" or the bullied seaman of "The Helmsman") are easily rendered into visual equivalents and given new life in Kuper's raw, expressionistic graphic style. His treatment of "The Hunger Artist" is faithful, though the condensation perhaps lacks some of the bleakly amusing ironies of the original; and "The Trees" ("For we are like tree trunks in the snow") becomes a too-obvious, though poignant, allegory of urban homelessness and despair.

Minds: The Minds of Existentialism: The Realm of Existentialism houses an eclectic aggregation of Philosophers, Poets, Psychologists, Playwrights and Theologians -- all major league players -- indepth biographies, books and reviews, quotations, and a state-of-the-art bookstore for a more in-depth exploration, One-on-One. to name a few: Karl Barth, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E. M. Cioran, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heidegger, William James, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Abraham H. Maslow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Blaise Pascal, Jean Paul Sartre, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Tillich, Theatre of the Absurd

Existential Basics: Basic Themes of Existentialism: The Bare Essentials for the Mind-on-Fire, a quick overview of some of the basic, ever-winding, rivers that run through Existentialism and the human experience; love, anxiety, stress, solitude, relationships, failure, sadness, death, loneliness, human frailty etc. A very meaty section in the Realm of Existentialism, and frequently up-dated! Topics such as: What is Existentialism? | Basic Themes of Existentialism | Existential-Speak | Existential Themed Books and Reviews | Existentialism and the Human Situation | Existentialism and the American Consciousness | Existentialism and Moral Individualism | Subjectivity and Existentialism | Existentialism, Choice and Commitment | Irrational Man : A Study in Existential Philosophy | Existentialism's Dread and Anxiety | Existentialism : Man and Human Relationships | Existentialism and the Significance of Being | World, Limits, Existence -- Existentialism | Problems of Existentialist Theology | Modern Existentialist and Phenomenological Studies | What is Phenomenology?

Existential-Speak: Existential-Speak: Words and phrases usually associated with the Philosophy of Existentialism. Alienation | Ambiguity | Angst or Anxiety | Awareness as Agony | Bad Faith | Being | Boredom | Christian Existentialism | Death | Demythologized | Ethics and Morality | Existence Precedes Essence | Existential | Existentialism | Faceless | Fight Club | for None and All | Futility | God is Dead! | Hell is Other People! | Individualism | Nausea | Nothingness -- Nonbeing | Phenomenology Theatre of the Absurd

Quotes: Quotes: Keeping the ball in the court of Existentialism and Existential thought, thousands of the most thought-provoking Quotations imaginable! Tastefully arranged and streamed from MindPleasures.com

Big News! It's Party Time, and you're invited! The Realm of Existentialism now has a Philosophy/Common Interest Group on FaceBook! Come on over and Join our little soirée!

Nature Photography by Katharena Eiermann. ...join me as I tickle the naked essence of this chaotic, and seemingly absurd, world with a new camera.

Powerful...a visual feast! --c. graham, portland, or

original, original, original! --j. landeau, juneau, ak

some of the most Stunning imagery i've ever seen! Thank you Katharena! --g. simmons, kauai, hi

© Photographer: Katharena Eiermann | Agency: Dreamstime.com

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