Table of Contents

FOREWORD BY JOHN UPDIKE
 
TWO INTRODUCTORY PARABLES
Before the Law*
An Imperial Message*
 
THE LONGER STORIES
Description of a Struggle
Wedding Preparations in the Country
The Judgment*
The Metamorphosis*
In the Penal Colony *
The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole]
Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor
The Warden of the Tomb
A Country Doctor*
The Hunter Gracchus
The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment
The Great Wall of China
The News of the Building of the Wall: A Fragment
A Report to an Academy *
A Report to an Academy: Two Fragments
The Refusal
A Hunger Artist*
Investigations of a Dog
A Little Woman*
The Burrow 325
Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk* 360
 
THE SHORTER STORIES
Children on a Country Road*
The Trees*
Clothes*
Excursion into the Mountains*
Rejection*
The Street Window*
The Tradesman*
Absent-minded Window-gazing*
The Way Home*
Passers-by*
On the Tram*
Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys*
The Wish to Be a Red Indian*
Unhappiness*
Bachelor’s Ill Luck*
Unmasking a Confidence Trickster*
The Sudden Walk*
Resolutions*
Dream*
Up in the Gallery *
A Fratricide*
The Next Village*
A Visit to a Mine*
Jackals and Arabs*
The Bridge
The Bucket Rider
The New Advocate*
An Old Manuscript*
The Knock at the Manor Gate
Eleven Sons*
My Neighbor
A Crossbreed [A Sport]
The Cares of a Family Man*
A Common Confusion
The Truth about Sancho Panza
The Silence of the Sirens
Prometheus
The City Coat of Arms
Poseidon
Fellowship
At Night
The Problem of Our Laws
The Conscription of Troops
The Test
The Vulture
The Helmsman
The Top
A Little Fable
Home-Coming
First Sorrow*
The Departure
Advocates
The Married Couple
Give it Up!
On Parables
 
* Published during Kafka’s lifetime.
 
POSTSCRIPT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
EDITORS AND TRANSLATORS
ON THE MATERIAL INCLUDED IN THIS VOLUME
CHRONOLOGY
SELECTED WRITINGS ON KAFKA

About the Author

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

Reviews

“[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.”
—from the Foreword by John Updike
 
“The distinction Kafka, or his heroes, draw between this world and the world does not imply that there are two different worlds, only that our habitual conceptions of reality are not the true conception.”
—W. H. Auden
 
“An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.”
—The New York Times