In a letter to a friend, Kafka once wrote: “I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it? What we need are books that affect us like some really grievous misfortune, like the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves, as if we were banished to distant forests, away from everybody, like a suicide; a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us” (qtd. in Koelb 72).
This quote is but one reason that I love teaching Kafka—no other author confounds, frustrates, and dazzles my students the way he does, whether it is with a tattoo machine that takes on a life of its own or a bucket that one can fly in desperate times, or a salesman that suddenly wakes up one day a “monstrous vermin.” And hidden within these fantastic tales are deeper issues about justice, faith, power dynamics, use value, and yes, even about writing itself. Take the tortuous machine in In the Penal Colony, which is rendered with such meticulous description while still defying reality. My students know the machine looks like, sort of. Same with the giant bug poor Gregor Samsa finds himself morphed into—my students have a hazy idea of what it looks like, but get them to draw it, and they find themselves at a loss (some just go for a standard cockroach to make it easy). This, to me, is the fantastic at its most powerful—it feels real on some level that we cannot rationalize.
Last spring in an honors seminar on modern fantasy literature, I had the opportunity to teach Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Overall, it was a very positive experience, with many of my students later telling me how they had recommended the novel to others. We spent three 75-minutes class periods on the novel, and while I certainly felt like we could have continued the discussion even further, this amount of time was enough to cover the main issues at stake in the novel. 
There are few stories that can render my students practically speechless the way that Kanai’s surreal, Alice in Wonderland tale gone wrong can. At first told from the viewpoint of a nameless “frame” narrator who struggles with writing, the story slowly descends into the realm of psychological madness once he/she encounters a rabbit. Not just any rabbit, mind you, but a human bunny, a girl named Lily who wears real rabbit fur from head to toe and a rabbit head, complete with pink glass eyes. Lily leads the narrator back to her dilapidated house, which the narrator describes as “rabbit hutch” since “the floor had wall-to-wall carpet of rabbit fur and on the walls were nailed fresh rabbit pelts” (4). Lily says there must be a reason that she ended up in such a state, and so begins to tell her story to the narrator, and to us.
