Edwin Muir Books

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.

On his thirtieth birthday, Josef K. is arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. In The Trial, Kafka brings us a nightmarish vision of the irrationality and blindness of modern bureaucracy in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes as the narrative is driven by a terrifying inevitability, driving the protagist towards a meaningless and helpless demise. The Trial is an existential masterpiece that resonates strongly with modern audiences.

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, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and 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.

Depicts the tragicomic misadventures of a young immigrant in New York.