The Trial

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror, with a new introduction and notes by Carolin Duttlinger

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

Review

"Breon Mitchell's translation of the restored text is an accomplishment of the highest order -- one that will honor Kafka, perhaps the most singular and compelling writer of our time, far into the twenty-first century."
-- Walter Abish, author of How German Is It

Praise for The Castle
translated by Mark Harman from the restored text

"The new Schocken edition of The Castle represents a major and long-awaited event in English- language publishing. It is a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Mark Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka's original manuscript."
-- Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University

"Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka's nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come."
-- J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"There is a great deal to applaud in Harman's translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka's uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English."
-- Robert Alter, The New Republic

About the Author

Franz Kafka (Author)
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. Several of his story collections were published in his lifetime and his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, were published posthumously by his editor Max Brod.