Willa Muir was a Scottish novelist, essayist, and translator who explored feminist themes and rendered significant German works into English. Her essays offer a profound inquiry into the condition of women, marked by intellectual rigor and sharp insight. Beyond her original writing, Muir's translations, including those of Franz Kafka, brought vital European literature to new audiences. Her legacy lies in this potent combination of feminist thought and dedicated literary translation.
Franz Kafka's enigmatic, deadpan, and deeply pessimistic stories are central to literary modernism. In 'The Metamorphosis', the estrangement of everyday life becomes corporealized when Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant bug and wonders how he is going to get to work on time. Kafka inverts the implied degradation of a man's transformation into an animal in 'A Report of the Academy', an ape's address to a group of scientists.
This volume is a celebration of the life and work of Willa Muir.
First published in 1935, The Trial is a classic story of totalitarianism, sadism, and hysteria. With a labyrinth of meanings, author Franz Kafka explores the dark lives of killers.
The story of K and his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his relentless, unavailing struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the castle that seems to rule it. K's isolation and perplexity, his begging for the approval of elu
This volume contains all of Kafka's shorter fiction, from fragments, parables and sketches to longer tales. Together they reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Some are well-known, others are mere jottings, observations of daily life, given artistic form through Kafka's unique perception of the world.
The Usurpers, was based on the diaries Willa Muir kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband was the Director the British Institute there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, it offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British and between them and their Czech allies and opponents.