Elizabeth M. Butler Book order (chronological)

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.

In this book, first published in 1946 as a second impression of a 1941 original, Butler profiles the influential poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seeing in him and his works a counteracting force to that of the destructive war in Europe. The biography addresses Rilke's life and the influences on his poetry, especially his time spent in Paris and his traumatizing military service in WWI. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Rilke.