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
Table of Contents:
Conversation with the Supplicant
Meditation
Children on a Country Road
Unmasking a Confidence Trickster
The Sudden Walk
Resolutions
Excursion into the Mountains
Bachelor's III Luck
The Tradesman
Absent-minded Window-gazing
The Way Home
Passers-by
On the Tram
Clothes
Rejection
Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys
The Street Window
The Wish to Be a Red Indian
The Trees
Unhappiness
The Judgment
The Metamorphosis
A Country Doctor
The New Advocate
A Country Doctor
Up in the Gallery
An Old Manuscript
Before the Law
Jackals and Arabs
A Visit to a Mine
The Next Village
An Imperial Message
The Cares of a Family Man
Eleven Sons
A Fratricide
A Dream
A Report to an Academy
The Bucket Rider
In the Penal Colony
A Hunger Artist
First Sorrow
A Little Woman
A Hunger Artist
Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk
Appendix
The First Long Train Journey, by Max Brod and Franz Kafka
The Aeroplanes at Brescia
Three Critical Pieces
Epilogue by Max Brod
"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
"Kafka engaged in no technical experiments whatsoever; without in any way changing the German language, he stripped it of its involved constructions until it became clear and simple, like everyday speech purified of slang and negligence. The common experience of Kafka's readers is one of general and vague fascination, even in stories they fail to understand, a precise recollection of strange and seemingly absurd images and descriptions--until one day the hidden meaning reveals itself to them with the sudden evidence of a truth simple and incontestable."
--Hannah Arendt
FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including "The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," and "The Stoker." He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub Date: November 14, 1995
0.67" H x 8.04" L x 5.2" W
320 pages
paperback