Anxious Pleasures explores intertextuality by appropriating and rewriting Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, about a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, from the points-of-view of the until-now secondary characters.

Calling the novel "intricately woven and richly imagined", Publishers Weekly's review concludes that Anxious Pleasures "is a cerebral treat unto itself and a fine companion to Kafka's original.

"[1] In an extended review essay written for the journal Hyperion, Timothy Attanucci argues that Anxious Pleasures "unfolds under the aegis of the imperative that all history is what historians like to call revisionist.

The coherence of any memory, any vision of the past, depends on the erasure of all that does not confirm the current interpretation.

In part, this means revising tired narratives, or as Olsen writes, 'short-circuiting the comfortable narratives produced by dominant cultures committed to seeing such stories told and retold until they begin to pass for something like truths about aesthetics and the human condition' (125).