Franz Kafka's sketches reveal a much sunnier creative side

Among the papers that writer Franz Kafka told his friend and executor to burn: 150 drawings which are much more cheerful than his fiction.

The Guardian reports that the collection of sketches and doodles, long hidden in a Swiss bank fault, was finally unveiled to the public last week.

Many of the pieces will also be published in a book that comes out in Germany tomorrow and the UK and US next spring.

Kafka, says the paper, explicitly asked Max Brod to burn his drawings, which the latter often picked up out of trash cans, after he died.

Brod ignored that request, as he did the other papers he inherited from Kafka (namely, his novels, short stories, and diaries).

Kafka's sketches, of which you can see a sample in the Guardian, are often abstract and include silly figures like clowns — in stark contrast to the gloominess seen in his works like The Metamorphosis.

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