This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself 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, th[Bokinfo]

Written during Kafka's final years as he battled tuberculosis, A Hunger Artist was the last work he personally prepared for publication before his death in 1924. The story appeared first in Die Neue Rundschau before being published as part of a collection by Verlag Die Schmiede. Max Brod recounted that Kafka revised the text extensively while staying at the Kierling sanatorium near Vienna, perhaps seeing parallels between the artist's physical withering and his own condition. The story chronicles the decline of a professional faster whose art form - public starvation displays - falls out of fashion with changing times. Set against the backdrop of Europe's post-war transformation, the text captures the death of old cultural forms and the public's shifting appetites for entertainment. The hunger artist's insistence on fasting beyond forty days - the maximum his impresario allows - points to the gap between artistic purity and commercial demands. His body becomes a battlefield where artistic integrity clashes with market forces, while his cage in the circus suggests how art gets relegated to sideshows in an age of mass entertainment. The hunger artist's final confession - that he fasted simply because he could never find food he liked - strips away the spiritual and artistic pretensions surrounding his performance. This revelation transforms the story from allegory about artistic sacrifice into something more ambiguous and personally haunting. The text resonates with Kafka's own complicated relationship to food, his sense of alienation from Prague's literary culture, and his struggles with tuberculosis that made eating difficult in his final years. When circus workers clear away the hunger artist's body like so much straw, replacing him with a young panther full of vital energy, the story delivers its sharpest bite - showing how quickly culture discards what it once celebrated, how thoroughly new forms devour the old. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.

The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

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'The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world' - The Wall Street JournalDating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad arr[Bokinfo]

In this open letter to his father – a letter which was never sent – Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, Dearest Father is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him, Kafka's inspired work is one of the most lucid and touching psychological documents in twentieth-century literature. This volume also includes passages from Kafka's diaries and correspondence.

Contemplation is a collection of 18 pieces of short prose by Franz Kafka, and was published late in the year of 1912. This was Kafka's first published book, and was picked up by publishing house Rowohlt, which at the time was quite young. The small collection bears the dedication For M.B., for Kafka's friend Max Brod. Contents: Children on the Country Road Unmasking of a Trickster The Sudden Walk Resolutions The Excursion to the Mountains The Misfortune of the Bachelor The Merchant Scattered Look Beyond The Way Home The Passers-By The Passenger Clothes The Rejection For the Amateur Jockeys' Contemplation The Alley Window The Wish to Become an Indian The Trees Being Unhappy

Description of a Struggle is a three-part story written by Franz Kafka between 1903 and 1907. It constitutes his oldest surviving work and was only published after his death. The first and third sections describe Prague society- and night-life from the point of view of the author and his acquaintance. The central section can be viewed as a fantastical dream sequence divided into several sub-sections. Kafka wrote two versions of this story.