Books by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)

by Franz Kafka

Since his death in 1924, Kafka has come to be regarded as one of the greatest modern writers, one whose work brilliantly explores the anxiety, futility, and complexity of modern life. The precision and clarity of Kafka's style, its powerful symbolism, and his existential exploration of the human condition have given his work universal significance.
In addition to the title selection, considered by many critics Kafka's most perfect work, this collection includes "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and "A Report to an Academy." Stanley Appelbaum has provided excellent new English translation of the stories and a brief Note placing them within Kafka's oeuvre.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Restored Text Translation)

by Franz Kafka

Newly restored to the original text: for this new translation, Hofmann returned to Kafka’s manuscripts, restoring matters of substance and detail, and even the book’s original ending. Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, "necessarily endless." Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated including the book's original "ending."

The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann’s “sleek translation does a wonderful job” and The New York Times concurred: “Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.”

Metamorphosis (Hesperus Classics)

by Franz Kafka

In this, his most famous story, Franz Kafka explores the notions of alienation and human loneliness through extraordinary narrative technique and depth of imagination. Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a repulsive bug. Trapped inside this hideous form, his mind remains unchanged—until he sees the shocked reaction of those around him. He begins to question the basis of human love and, indeed, the entire purpose of his existence. But this, it seems, is only the beginning of his ordeal. Franz Kafka is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century literature; his work, much of which was published posthumously, includes The Trial and The Castle.

The Castle

by Franz Kafka

From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman.

Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties.

The Castle's original manuscript was left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.

The Castle

by Franz Kafka

An acclaimed translation of the final work by Franz Kafka—author of Metamorphosis and some of the twentieth century's greatest literature—following the story of a man's bizarre, unending struggle to carry out his mysterious new job

A Penguin Classic

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete.

The Castle

by Franz Kafka

Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.’s consuming quest–quite possibly a self-imposed one–to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish “to get clear about ultimate things,” an unrealizable desire that provided the driving force behind all of Kafka’s dazzlingly uncanny fictions.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

The Castle

by Franz Kafka

The protagonist of this Kafka classic, K., finds himself in a faraway, snow-covered village with a castle looming above. The inhabitants of the mysterious castle are also the strict officials who govern the village. When K. tries to reach out to the officials, he gets himself into a complex misunderstanding over the contradictory rules and regulations that dictate the daily life of the villagers. The Castle explores the conflicting tension of power between individuals―represented by K.―and the authorities―the officials in the castle.

Praise for The Castle:

“Artwork that is . . . suggestive of woodcuts and expressionism in general and German artist Käthe Kollwitz in particular.” ―Booklist

The Trial (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Franz Kafka

A brilliant translation of one of the greatest works of Franz Kafka, author of Metamorphosis, telling the haunting story of a man's desperate search for answers amid his prosecution for an unknown crime

A Penguin Classic

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis—an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life—including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door—becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

Metamorphosis and Other Stories: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Franz Kafka

A brilliant new translation of Kafka’s best-known work, published for the 125th anniversary of his birth

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

by Franz Kafka

A new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.

“Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” ―Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka’s preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style.

Cohen’s selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator―God.

The Metamorphosis: A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky

by Franz Kafka

“This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don’t hesitate: this is the transforming text for you.”―Richard Howard Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle millions of readers.

In her new translation of Kafka’s masterpiece, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment.

Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories

by Franz Kafka

Award-winning graphic novelist Peter Kuper presents a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Kafka short stories.
Long fascinated with the work of Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper began illustrating his stories in 1988. Initially drawn to the master’s dark humor, Kuper adapted the stories over the years to plumb their deeper truths. Kuper’s style deliberately evokes Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel, contemporaries of Kafka whose wordless novels captured much of the same claustrophobia and mania as Kafka’s tales. Working from new translations of the classic texts, Kuper has reimagined these iconic stories for the twenty-first century, using setting and perspective to comment on contemporary issues like civil rights and homelessness.
Longtime lovers of Kafka will appreciate Kuper’s innovative interpretations, while Kafka novices will discover a haunting introduction to some of the great writer’s most beguiling stories, including "A Hunger Artist," "In The Penal Colony," and "The Burrow." Kafkaesque stands somewhere between adaptation and wholly original creation, going beyond a simple illustration of Kafka’s words to become a stunning work of art.

Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories

by Franz Kafka

Winner of the 2018 Silver Reuben Award for Graphic Novels
A Boston Globe and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
In Kafkaesque, Peter Kuper combines stunning artistic technique with shrewd political and social commentary for a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Franz Kafka short stories.

The Metamorphosis (Bantam Classics)

by Franz Kafka

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”

The Basic Kafka

by Franz Kafka

The Basic Kafka Mass Market Paperback FranzKafka PocketBooks

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

Six absurdist, humorous short stories from renowned Danish poet Benny Andersen.

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

“Trevor was our twentieth century Chekov."—Wall Street Journal

Selected as one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year.
Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Award, and five-time nominee for the Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our era. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Trevor has crafted exquisitely rendered tales that brilliantly illuminate the human condition. A powerful collection by "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" (The New Yorker), Selected Stories brings together forty-eight stories from After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side, and Cheating at Canasta.

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

This magnificent summation of the short stories of Shirley Ann Grau, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Keepers of the House, gathers together eighteen gems ranking with the finest of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Grau possesses a range representing a master course in the craft of this most demanding art form. Her reader's banquet offers character sketches of Chekovian poignance and insight, a hilarious love story, excursions into the gothic and hauntingly apocalyptic, the elegiac and experimental, and stories that feel like compressed novels in their lapidary polish, depth, and emotional weight. Grau belongs in the company of the great southern short story writers, and the author's own choices of her best work remind readers of the unmatched capacity of the brief fictional form to depict character epiphany and such timeless themes as redemption and rebirth, the struggle between power and love, and the persistence of the past. AUTHOR BIO: Shirley Ann Grau grew up in

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

This magnificent summation of the short stories of Shirley Ann Grau, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Keepers of the House, gathers together eighteen gems ranking with the finest of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Grau possesses a range representing a master course in the craft of this most demanding art form. Her reader's banquet offers character sketches of Chekovian poignance and insight, a hilarious love story, excursions into the gothic and hauntingly apocalyptic, the elegiac and experimental, and stories that feel like compressed novels in their lapidary polish, depth, and emotional weight. Grau belongs in the company of the great southern short story writers, and the author's own choices of her best work remind readers of the unmatched capacity of the brief fictional form to depict character epiphany and such timeless themes as redemption and rebirth, the struggle between power and love, and the persistence of the past.

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

"There’s just something weirdly perfect about Troy James Weaver’s stories. Perfect because they are, down to their syllables. Weird because what they do feels so broken it hurts. It’s a kind of double whammy effect, part awe, part ache, that’s truly singular as far as I know."
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
“I don’t like telling people what to do and I don’t like being told what to do. But right now I’m telling you to read the stories of Troy James Weaver. From the beginning, Weaver’s been unafraid to show us humanity in all its grotesque, stupid, and beautiful glory. His stories are for the young and for the old, for the strong and the weak, for the sick and the dying and the dead. Luckily, if you’re reading this, you’re alive and you’re holding this book in your hands. Read these stories and learn a little bit about what it means to be alive.”
—Joseph Grantham, author of Raking Leaves

Selected Stories

by Franz Kafka, William Trevor, Benny Andersen, Shirley Ann Grau, Troy James Weaver

A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.

Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose―terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.

Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.

Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.

The Castle: Introduction by Irving Howe (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

by Franz Kafka

From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties.

As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.’s consuming quest–quite possibly a self-imposed one–to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish “to get clear about ultimate things,” an unrealizable desire that provided the driving force behind all of Kafka’s dazzlingly uncanny fictions.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories

by Franz Kafka

Including his most widely recognized short works, as well as two new stories, this translation of Franz Kafka’s writings illuminate one of the century’s most controversial writers.

Translated by PEN translation award-winner Joachim Neugroschel, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories has garnered critical acclaim and is widely recognized as the preeminent English-language anthology of Kafka's stories.

Neugroschel’s translation of Kafka's work has made this controversial and monumental writing accessible to a whole new generation. This classic collection of forty-one great short works—including such timeless pieces of modern fiction as "The Judgment" and "The Stoker"—now includes two new stories, "First Sorrow" and "The Hunger Artist."

Amerika: The Missing Person

by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he like to call his "American novel,: but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that fall and wrote until the last completed chapter in 1914, but in wasn't until 1927, three years after his death, that Amerika--the title that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod gave his edited version of the unfinished manuscript--was published in Germany by Kurt Wolff Verlag. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published in Great Britain in 1932 and in the United States in 1946.

Over the last thirty years, an international team of Kafka scholars has been working on German-language critical editions of all of Kafka's writings, going back to the original manuscripts and notes, correcting transcription errors, and removing Brod's editorial and stylistic interventions to create texts that are as close as possible to the way the author left them.

With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his award-winning translation of The Castle, Mark Harman now restores the humor ad particularity of language in his translation of the critical edition of Der Verschollene. Here is the story of young Karl Rossman, who, following an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. With unquenchable optimism and in the company of two comic-sinister companions, he throws himself into misadventure, eventually heading towards Oklahoma, where a career in the theater beckons. Though we can never know how Kafka planned to end the novel, Harman's superb translation allows us to appreciate, as closely as possible, what Kafka did commit to the page.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

“An invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times

An essential new translation of Franz Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most important, influential, and visionary writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications—notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones.

By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive— and often surprisingly unpolished—writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

“An invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times

An essential new translation of Franz Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most important, influential, and visionary writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications—notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones.

By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive— and often surprisingly unpolished—writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories

by Franz Kafka

The complete stories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.

“An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.” —The New York Times

The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume.

“[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” —from the Foreword by John Updike

The Metamorphosis: And Other Stories (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial: A collection that brings together the stories he allowed to be published during his lifetime, including his best-known tale of a man who wakes up transformed into an insect.

To Max Brod, his literary executor, Kafka wrote: “Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these.”

“Kafka’s survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: ‘With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.’ There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.” —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth and On Beauty

The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library), Book Cover May Vary

by Franz Kafka

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.

In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.

Amerika

by Franz Kafka

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
Foreword by E. L. Doctorow
Afterword by Max Brod

Kafka’s first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself “packed off to America” by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.

Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vast landscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the “golden land.” Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic and visionary tale of America “as a place no one has yet seen, in a historical period that can’t be identified,” writes E. L. Doctorow in his new foreword. “Kafka made his novel from his own mind’s mythic elements,” Doctorow explains, “and the research data that caught his eye were bent like rays in a field of gravity.”

Aphorisms (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s aphorisms are fascinating glimpses into the lure and the enigma of the form itself. • From the acclaimed author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—and one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century.

The aphorism eludes definition: it can appear to be a random jotting or a more polished observation. Whether arbitrary fragment or crystalline shard, an aphorism captures the inception of a thought. Franz Kafka composed aphorisms during two periods in his life. A series of 109 was written between September 1917 and April 1918, in Zürau, West Bohemia, while Kafka was on a visit to his sister Ottla, hoping for a brief respite following the diagnosis of the tuberculosis virus that would eventually claim his life.

They were originally published in 1931, seven years after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, under the title Betrachtungen über Sünde, Hoffnung, Leid, und den wahren Wag (Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way). The second sequence of aphorisms, numbering 41, originally appeared as entries in Kafka’s diary from January 6 to February 29, 1920. They, too, were published posthumously, under the title “Er”: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahr 1920 (“He”: Reflections from the Year 1920).

The Zurau Aphorisms

by Franz Kafka

The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.

Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These “aphorisms” appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings–some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka’s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka’s opus–a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.

The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Jen Bryant

Imagine you are Bruno Richard Hauptmann, accused of murdering the son of the most famous man in America.

In a compelling, immediate voice, 12-year-old Katie Leigh Flynn takes us inside the courtroom of the most widely publicized criminal case of the 20th century: the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby son. And in doing so, she reveals the real-life figures of the trial—the accused, the lawyers, the grieving parents—and the many faces of justice.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Jen Bryant

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis: Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information.

Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Jen Bryant

Through tight dialogue and absurd settings Kafka creates a maze-like prose to mimic the bureaucracy of early 20th century Germany, trapping his protagonist in an unlawful conviction that alters the path of his life.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated from German by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, and features an afterword by David Stuart Davies.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a young bank official named Joseph K is arrested although he has done nothing wrong and is never told what he’s been charged with. The Trial is the chronicle of his fight to prove his innocence, of his struggles and encounters with the invisible Law and the untouchable Court where he must make regular visits. It is an account, ultimately, of state-induced self-destruction presenting in a nightmarish scenario the persecution of the outsider and the incomprehensible machinations of the state. Using the power of simple, straightforward language Kafka draws the reader into this bleak and frightening world so that we too experience the fears, uncertainties and tragedy of Joseph K.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Jen Bryant

Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World’s finest literature. Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before: the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these books feel extra special and look striking on any shelf.

The Trial by Franz Kafka is a terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K. An ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Jen Bryant

'Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K. for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.' A successful professional man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. The mysterious court which conducts his trial is outwardly co-operative, but capable of horrific violence. Faced with this ambiguous authority, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure. He consults various advisers without escaping his fate. Was there some way out that he failed to see? Kafka's unfinished novel has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. One of the iconic figures of modern world literature, Kafka writes about universal problems of guilt, responsibility, and freedom; he offers no solutions, but provokes his readers to arrive at meanings of their own. This new edition includes the fragmentary chapters that were omitted from the main text, in a translation that is both natural and exact, and an introduction that illuminates the novel and its author. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures

by Franz Kafka

A masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most fantastical and visionary short fiction Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in “Little Fable” to the absurd humor of “Investigations of a Dog,” from the elaborate waking nightmare of “Building the Great Wall of China” to the creeping unease of “The Burrow,” where a nameless creature’s labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

The Lost Writings

by Franz Kafka

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages).
“Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop―it doesn’t matter!―after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”

The Metamorphosis (Modern Library Classics)

by Franz Kafka

Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold
Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

This Modern Library edition collects Stanley Corngold’s acclaimed English translation—long hailed as the gold standard by scholars and general readers alike—along with seven critical essays by writers including Philip Roth, W. H. Auden, and Walter Benjamin, background and contextual material, and a new Introduction from Corngold himself.

Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka

by Franz Kafka

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers.

Contents:

• Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning
• Letter to Ernst Rowohlt
• Reflections
• Concerning Parables
• Children on the Country Road
• The Spinning Top
• The Street-Side Window
• At Night
• Unhappiness
• Clothes Make the Man
• On the Inability to Write
• From Somewhere in the Middle
• I Can Also Laugh
• The Need to Be Alone
• So I Sat at My Stately Desk
• A Writer's Quandary
• Give it Up!
• Eleven Sons
• Paris Outing
• The Bridge
• The Trees
• The Truth About Sancho Pansa
• The Silence of the Sirens
• Prometheus
• Poseidon
• The Municipal Coat of Arms
• A Message from the Emperor
• The Next Village Over
• First Sorrow
• The Hunger Artist
• Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice
• Investigations of a Dog
• A Report to an Academy
• A Hybrid
• Transformed
• In the Penal Colony
• From The Burrow
• Selected Aphorisms
• Selected Last Conversation Shreds
• In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword)
• The Back of Words (A Post Script)

The Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka

A brilliant, darkly comic reimagining of Kafka’s classic tale of family, alienation, and a giant bug.

Acclaimed graphic artist Peter Kuper presents a kinetic illustrated adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Kuper’s electric drawings—where American cartooning meets German expressionism—bring Kafka’s prose to vivid life, reviving the original story’s humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike.

The Metamorphosis: The Illustrated Edition

by Franz Kafka

A stunning graphic novel adaptation of Franz Kafka’s famous story of a man who finds himself transformed into a monstrous cockroach.

“Darkly appropriate . . . Kuper’s work rivals that of Art Spiegelman.”—Chicago Sun-Times

Acclaimed graphic artist Peter Kuper presents a brilliant, darkly comic reimagining of Kafka’s classic tale of family, alienation, and a giant bug. Kuper’s electric drawings—which merge American cartooning with German expressionism—bring Kafka’s prose to vivid life, reviving the original story’s humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike.

The Trial (Illustrated Classics): A Graphic Novel

by Franz Kafka

“Someone must have been slandering Joseph K, because one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was suddenly arrested.” The Trial is a graphic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s famous novel, illustrated by one of France’s leading graphic artists, Chantal Montellier. Montellier brilliantly captures both the menace and the humor of Kafka’s utterly unique masterwork. This darkly humorous tale follows Joseph K, who is arrested one morning for unexplained reasons and forced to struggle against an absurd judicial process. K finds himself thrown from one disorientating encounter to the next as he becomes increasingly desperate to prove his innocence in the face of unknown charges. In its stark portrayal of an authoritarian bureaucracy trampling over the lives of its estranged citizens, The Trial is as relevant today as ever.

Metamorphosis And The Trial

by Franz Kafka

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The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press Classics)

by Franz Kafka

New translations of the best stories by the one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers

Kafka, whose name has generated an adjective, is one of the best loved writers of the twentieth century. Known for his dark, enigmatic stories, for the absurd nightmares he depicts, his extraordinary imaginative depth is clear in stories from 'A Hunger Artist' to 'The Verdict'.
But Kafka also wrote fizzingly funny, fresh stories, and The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man contains all the aspects of this genius: the wit and the grit; the horror and the humour; the longing and the laughing. They range from bizarre, two-sentence stories about Don Quixote to the famous brutal depiction of violence and justice that is 'In the Penal Colony'.
In a nimble new translation by the acclaimed Alexander Starritt, this collection of Kafka's essential stories shows the genius at his very best.

The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press Classics)

by Franz Kafka

The best stories by the one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers

No one has captured the modern experience, its wild dreams, strange joys, its neuroses and boredom, better than Franz Kafka. His vision, with its absurdity and twisted humour, has lost none of its force or relevance today. This essential collection, translated and selected by Alexander Starritt, casts fresh light on Kafka's genius.

Alongside brutal depictions of violence and justice are jokes and deceptively slight, mysterious fables. These unforgettable pieces reflect the brilliance at the core of Franz Kafka, arguably most fully expressed within his short stories. Together they showcase a writer of unmatched imaginative depth, capable of expressing the most profound reality with a wry smile.

Das Schloss Roman : in der Fassung der Handschrift

by Franz Kafka

Klassiker aus dem Jahr 2008 im Fachbereich Germanistik - Neuere Deutsche Literatur, Note: -, -, - Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet." So beginnt die Geschichte des Josef K., dem an seinem 30. Geburtstag von einer mysteriösen Behörde der Prozeß gemacht werden soll. Und je mehr er seine Unschuld verteidigen will, um so tiefer sinkt er ins Gestrüpp undurchschaubarer Gesetze und menschlicher Verwirrungen. Josef K. muß schließlich erkennen, daß der "Sinn dieser großen Organisation, dieser korrupten Bande", der Sinn dieses geheimnisvollen Prozesses die "Sinnlosigkeit" ist. Der Prozeß, der erste Roman Franz Kafkas, zwischen 1914 und 1915 entstanden und 1925 zum ersten Mal erschienen, ist zwar Fragment geblieben, aber dennoch ein großes Werk der Weltliteratur. Die Bedeutung für das 20. Jahrhundert kann nicht überschätzt werden: Denn der Prozeß, den Josef K. über sich ergehen lassen muß, ist auch ein Prozeß, den er - unschuldig-schuldig - sich selbst macht und verlieren muß.

Erzählungen.

by Franz Kafka, Michael Muller

Book by Kafka, Franz

Das Urteil

by Franz Kafka

Normaler Versicherungsangestellter im Leben, hat Franz Kafka ein eigenwilliges Werk voll grotesker Begebenheiten hinterlassen. Ein Handlungsreisender zum Beispiel verwandelt sich in Kafkas berühmtester Erzählung in einen Käfer, ein Sohn geht auf die Prophetie seines Vaters hin ins Wasser. Irrwitzig, rätselhaft, doch mit überzeugender Plausibilität erzählt Kafka vom Kampf des Menschen gegen eine verborgene Übermacht. Mit den Beiträgen zu beiden Werken aus Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Mit Daten zu Leben und Werk, exklusiv verfasst von der Redaktion der Zeitschrift für Literatur TEXT + KRITIK.

Erzählungen und Parabeln. EinFach Deutsch Textausgaben: Gymnasiale Oberstufe

by Franz Kafka

None

Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa

by Franz Kafka

Rare Book

The Transformation (Metamorphosis) and Other Stories: Works Published During Kafka's Lifetime (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

by Franz Kafka

A companion volume to The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, these new translations bring together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. This volume contains his most famous story. The Transformation, more popularly known as Metamorphosis. Other works include Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and A Fasting Artist, a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka's life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

Contemplación: Historia de una lucha (Spanish Edition)

by Franz Kafka

Poetry becomes prose in Contemplación, and words become images, ghosts, and thoughts. Kafka conveys images similar to paintings or photographs, and manages to reach the reader despite the temporal distance that separates him from us although his urban landscape is no longer, even remotely, ours.

The Sons: The Judgment, The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, and Letter to His Father (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Trial: Three stories he published in his lifetime, including his best-known tale, “The Metamorphosis.”

I have only one request," Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. "'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' and 'The Judgment' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons."

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

by Franz Kafka

More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924. 

Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, these letters, collected after Kafka's death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923

by Franz Kafka

The diaries of the acclaimed author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—provide a penetrating look into Prague and the life and dreams of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. 

These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a look into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.

Modern Classics Castle (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Franz Kafka

A surreal work of psychological horror, Franz Kafka's The Castle is translated by J. A. Underwood with an introduction by Idris Parry in Penguin Modern Classics. The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-speaking insurance clerk who despised his job, preferring to spend his time writing. Nevertheless, Kafka published little during his lifetime, and ordered his closest friend to burn the mass of unpublished manuscripts, now familiar to us as some of the most influential novels and short stories of the twentieth century, after his death. Kafka's novels, all published posthumously, include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. If you enjoyed The Castle, you might like Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Every time you read The Castle, you find something new in it' Sunday Times 'Kafka discovered the hitherto unknown possibilities of the novel' Milan Kundera 'Kafka may be the most important writer of the twentieth century' J.G. Ballard

The Burrow and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Franz Kafka

A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening and visionary short fiction Strange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Some are less than a page long, others more substantial; all were unpublished in his lifetime. These matchless short works range from the gleeful miniature horror 'Little Fable' to the off-kilter humour of 'Investigations of a Dog', and from the elaborate waking nightmare of 'Building the Great Wall of China' to the creeping unease of 'The Burrow', where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories

by Franz Kafka

'In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.' Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their entirety in this edition, which also contains other, uncollected stories and a selection of posthumously published works that have become part of the Kafka canon. Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, these stories approach human experience at a tangent: a singing mouse, an ape, an inquisitive dog, and a paranoid burrowing creature are among the protagonists, as well as the professional starvation artist. A patient seems to be dying from a metaphysical wound; the war-horse of Alexander the Great steps aside from history and adopts a quiet profession as a lawyer. Fictional meditations on art and artists, and a series of aphorisms that come close to expressing Kafka's philosophy of life, further explore themes that recur in his major novels. Newly translated, and with an invaluable introduction and notes, Kafka's short stories are haunting and unforgettable. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Man Who Disappeared: (America) (Oxford World's Classics)

by Franz Kafka, Ritchie Robertson

Entering New York harbor, the young immigrant Karl Rossmann sees the Statue of Liberty, "her arm with the sword stretched upward." This forbidding introduction sets the tone for Kafka's narrative about an innocent European astray in an ultra-modern America that is both a fantasy and an object of social satire. Full of incident and blackly humorous, Kafka's first novel portrays American civilization with horrified fascination, in a biting satire which gives fresh meaning to the term "Kafkaesque." Ritchie Robertson's sensitive and natural translation is both faithful to Kafka's style and highly readable. Moreover, this is the only edition to provide a full introduction and explanatory notes. The introduction explains why Kafka set the novel in America, a country he had never visited, what his sources of information were, and how he distorts his fictional America for satirical purposes. The notes incorporate the most recent Kafka scholarship to illuminate difficult parts of the text. In addition, a Biographical Preface provides an account of Kafka's life. The book also includes an up-to-date bibliography and a chronology.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Letters To Felice (Schocken Classics)

by Franz Kafka

More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924.

Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, these letters, collected after Kafka's death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

by Franz Kafka

'When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.' With a bewildering blend of the everyday and the fantastical, Kafka thus begins his most famous short story, The Metamorphosis. A commercial traveller is unexpectedly freed from his dreary job by his inexplicable transformation into an insect, which drastically alters his relationship with his family. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgement also concerns family tensions, when a power struggle between father and son ends with the father passing an enigmatic judgement on the helpless son. The third story, In the Penal Colony, explores questions of power, justice, punishment, and the meaning of pain in a colonial setting. These three stories are flanked by two very different works. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poignant mood-pictures, while in the autobiographical Letter to his Father, Kafka analyses his difficult relationship in forensic and devastating detail. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's bizarrely comedic meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation expressed through the story of a man who is transformed overnight into a giant beetle, now repackaged with a beautifully designed jacket by noted illustrator Malika Favre.



Only yesterday, Gregor Samsa was a meek salesman, browbeaten by his unappreciative employer and depended on fiercely by his ungrateful family. This morning, Gregor awakens to discover that, overnight, he has been transformed into a monstrous insect. First published in 1915, Kafka's best-known tale has inspired numerous interpretations for more than a century and helped to establish the term "Kafkaesque" as a reference to a bizarre and nightmarish experience. This collection of his short fiction, in a new translation, includes more than thirty of his short stories and sketches, including "In the Penal Colony," "The Stoker," "The Judgment," "A Country Doctor," "A Hunger Artist," and more.

The Castle (Oxford World's Classics)

by Franz Kafka

Kafka's last novel, The Castle is set in a remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats. The novel breaks new ground in exploring the relation between the individual and power, asking why the villagers so readily submit to an authority which may exist only in their collective imagination. Published only after Kafka's death, The Castle appeared in the same decade as modernist masterpieces by Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mann and Proust, and is among the central works of modern literature. This new translation by prize-winning translator Anthea Bell follows the German text established by critical scholarship, and mentions manuscript variants in the notes. The detailed introduction by Ritchie Robertson, a leading Kafka scholar, explores the many meanings of this famously enigmatic novel, providing guidance without reducing the reader's freedom to make sense of this fascinating novel. In addition, the edition includes a Biographical Preface which places Kafka within the context of his time, plus an up-to-date bibliography and chronology of Kafka's life.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings

by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.

These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.

Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

by Franz Kafka

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—a collection of stories that represent the art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real.

Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales that are scrupulously naturalistic on the surface and uncanny in their depths.

This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that bring out the writer’s extraordinary range and intensity of vision.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Modern Classics Great Wall of China: And Other Short Works

by Franz Kafka

Drawing directly on original manuscripts, this collection comprises the major short stories published after Kafka’s death. It includes The Great Wall of China, Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor, Investigations of a Dog and his great sequences of aphorisms, with fables and parables on subjects ranging from the legend of Prometheus to the Tower of Babel. Allegorical, disturbing and possessing a dream-like clarity, these writings are quintessential Kafka.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

by Franz Kafka

"Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." —W. H. Auden

Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. 

"Extraordinary…touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking…. The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." —The New York Times

In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.

Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater: Bilingual Edition (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

A son’s poignant letter to his father—from the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. • “One of the great confessions of literature.” —The New York Times Book Review

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka’s probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son’s gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.

Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)

by Franz Kafka

From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, his first—and funniest—novel.

Amerika tells the story of the young Karl Rossmann who, after an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.

Kafka began writing what he had entitled Der Verschollene (The Missing Person) in 1912 and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914. But it wasn’t until 1927, three years after his death, that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, edited the unfinished manuscript and published it as Amerika.

Blue Octavo Notebooks

by Franz Kafka

Originally omitted from Kafka's famous diaries, these notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms
From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka ceased to keep a diary, for which he had used quarto-size notebooks, instead writing in a series of smaller, octavo-size notebooks. When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks―which include short stories, fragments of stories and other literary writings―because, he wrote, “notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception.” The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known and yet are among the most characteristic and brilliantly gnomic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms within their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence. Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding.” –Library Journal.

A Hunger-Artist

by Franz Kafka

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

The whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people's participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cage

Reading these stories by the master of the absurd is like entering a dreamworld in which nothing, and yet somehow everything, makes sense.

La Metamorfosis

by Franz Kafka

«No importa cuántas veces penetre uno en este libro; al final siempre se pregunta lo mismo: ¿Cómo lo ha hecho? Y es que se trata de una novela sin forro. Quiero decir con ello que le das la vuelta y es exactamente igual por un lado que por otro: ni siquiera es fácil advertir, una vez colocada del revés, esa fina cicatriz que en los calcetines delata si se encuentran de uno u otro lado. No hay forma de verle las costuras. [...] La simpleza aparente del relato es tal que si uno va levantando capas de materiales narrativos en busca del motor primordial, cuando levanta el último velo no hay nada detrás. Nada. En eso, curiosamente, La metamorfosis nos recuerda a la vida.»

It does not matter how many times one reads this book; in the end the reader will always ask himself the same question: how did he do it? The book itself is confusing in that it does not have a cover. If you turn it over, it is the same on one side as on the other. It's not easy to notice because there is no way to see the seams. The apparent simplicity of the story turns into the reader lifting layers of narrative.

Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka, Michael Hoffman

'I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.'

Featuring an ordinary man who wakes up to find himself turned into a giant cockroach, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, is brought together here with the best of his short stories.

A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.

Metamorphosis Illustrated by Gaby Verdooren

by Franz Kafka

A beautiful jacketed hardback edition of Franz Kafka's classic novel, Metamorphosis, with brand-new, full-color illustrations by Gaby Verdooren.

A masterful mix of horror and absurdity which tells the story of travelling salesman Samsa, who wakes up one day to find out he has turned into a giant insect. Kafka's novella has been adapted for film and television a number of times, most recently for radio when BBC's Radio broadcast the story, read by Benedict Cumberbatch, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its first publication.

This beautifully illustrated collector's edition features the complete text, with an original Arcturus translation by Will Aaltonen Pearson and specially-commissioned illustrations by Gaby Verdooren Whether you're approaching Metamorphosis for the first time, or want to experience it afresh with new illustrations, this collectible edition is perfect for any lover of classic literature.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Illustrated Classics series brings together handsome hardcover editions of classic works, beautifully presented with full-color, specially-commissioned illustrations, patterned endpapers and dust jackets.

The Metamorphosis & Other Stories (Signature Gilded Editions)

by Franz Kafka

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