Edwin Muir Book order (chronological)

Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossman who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents.

Kafka's first published book (1913), Contemplation is composed of eighteen "prose poems," displaying the full range of Kafka's compact metaphorical style. In this new translation, Kevin Blahut has been faithful to the original German while rendering it in a fresh, contemporary English. This edition is complemented by 18 black & white illustrations, attesting to the lasting inspiration of Kafka's prose.

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.

From his sheltered childhood in Orkney to the turmoil of industrial Glasgow, Edwin Muir was witness to some of the most traumatic years and events of our modern age. And yet, in his life and in his art, he was constantly haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface reality of the everyday. From his dream notebooks to his travels in Eastern Europe, Muir paints an unforgettable picture of the slow and sometimes painful growth of a poet's sensibility as he comes to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the twentieth century.

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers , Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss. Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic) , a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin (The Anarchist) , or an opportunistic war-deserter (The Realist) , Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters' psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.

From his sheltered childhood in Orkney to the turmoil of industrial Glasgow, Edwin Muir was witness to some of the most traumatic years and events of our modern age. And yet, in his life and in his art, he was constantly haunted by the symbolic 'fable' which he longed to find beneath the surface reality of the everyday. From his dream notebooks to his travels in Eastern Europe, Muir paints an unforgettable picture of the slow and sometimes painful growth of a poet's sensibility as he comes to terms with his own nature amidst the terror and confusion of the twentieth century.

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.