We were excited when a researcher exposed a stash of pornography—long ignored by uptight scholars—in the notebooks of dark writer Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis author apparently subscribed to the naughty illustrated magazines of the day, probably for the articles. Scholars hate the fact that this is now public: "to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald's," said [researcher] Anjana Shrivastava. Yeah, well, his porn does sound pretty strange (not that we're judging):

Franz Kafka wrote dark, brilliant, surreal works of souls in crisis, bureaucracy run amuck, dehumanizing class systems-and a lot of dirty, sexy smut. Researches have discovered a bounty of porn in the great writer's notebooks, and they mean for you to read it. "Experts have unearthed a stash of explicit pornographic material belonging to German [he was Czech, actually] author Franz Kafka. The erotic material has been ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer's image. James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert came across the material in copies of Kafka's journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford. Hawes said that the author's stash shows him as more human than a popular quasi-saintly writer. 'These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It's quite unpleasant.'"