Willa Muir Book order (chronological)

This volume is a celebration of the life and work of Willa Muir.

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, ‘The Metamorphosis’ is accompanied in this volume by a selection of other classic tales and sketches by Kafka – such as ‘The Judgement’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Country Doctor’ – all presented in a lively and meticulous new translation by Christopher Moncrieff.

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.

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.