Daily Rituals: How Artists Work; Daily Rituals: Women at Work

The passage above is excerpted from a letter Franz Kafka wrote to his beloved Felice Bauer in 1912. In the letter, Kafka conveys his dissatisfaction with his cramped living conditions and monotonous job, reflecting his belief in using subtle, strategic maneuvers to remove his constraints. Mason Currey, a Los Angeles-based writer and journalist, cited this excerpt in his book titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013 83-84). Daily Rituals books illustrate how successful individuals overcome numerous challenges in their creative pursuits. In the first book, titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Currey explores the daily routines and habits of what appears to be a random selection of 161 creative individuals, including writers, artists, composers, and other influential figures, to provide insights into how they structure their days, balance their work and personal lives, and find inspiration. Currey utilizes direct e-mails, magazine profiles, newspaper obits, and biographies, as well as direct quotes from letters, personal diaries, and interviews to let them speak for themselves. In other cases, he has assembled a summary of their routines from secondary sources, and if another writer has produced the perfect distillation of their subject’s routine, he has quoted it at length rather than try to rewrite it himself. Mason Currey assures readers that they will “find more information on particular subjects’ routines, habits, quirks, and foibles” (237). This book, in the form of vignettes, caters to intellectual curiosity while also offering readers a fascinating look into diverse ways that creative people such as Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Miller, and Jane Austen manage their time and productivity.