(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposed one-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish "to get clear about...

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Franz Kafka's imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales. Scrupulously naturalistic on the surface, uncanny in their depths, these stories represent the achieved art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real.This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that...

This collection brings together the stories that Kafka allowed to be published during his lifetime. To Max Brod, his literary executor, he wrote: "Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these."