The Trial

One of Kafka’s best known works, The Metamorphosis, tells the story of the salesman Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning and finds himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (ungezures from the German Ungeziefer, literally «monstrous vermin»). Samsa, finding himself in this new condition, subsequently decides to struggle to adapt to this, his new way of life.

The novel has become one of the classics of world literature and, as such, has been much discussed by literary critics, who have offered different interpretations.

In A Report to an Academy the narrator, speaking before a scientific conference, describes his former life as a monkey. His story begins in a West African jungle, where a hunting expedition captures him.

Caged on a ship for his journey to Europe, he finds himself without the freedom to move as he did.

Needing to escape this situation, he studies the habits of the crew and imitates them with surprising ease; he recounts that he only finds particular difficulty in learning to drink alcohol. Throughout the story, the narrator reiterates that he learned his human behavior not out of any desire to be human, but only to provide himself with a means of escaping his cage.

The Country Doctor is a collection of short stories written mainly in 1917 by Franz Kafka, containing the short story of the same name. Kurt Wolff published it in 1919 as Kafka’s second collection of short stories, after Betrachtung (Contemplation, 1912).

Kafka dedicated the collection to his father. He often told Max Brod of his father’s reaction when he presented it to him, “Lay it on my nightstand”.

The stories themselves have something in common: somewhere, either at the beginning or later in the course of the text, there is an unsettling moment, sometimes referred to as the “Kafka paradox.”

In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918 and first published in October 1919.

The story takes place in an unnamed penal colony. The internal clues and the island setting suggest Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden as an influence.

The story describes the final use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner into his skin before leaving him to die, all over the course of twelve hours. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns more and more about the machine, including its origin and original justification.

A Hunger Artist is Franz Kafka’s collection of four short stories, the last collection Kafka himself prepared for publication. Kafka was able to correct it during his final illness, but the book was published by Verlag Die Schmiede several months after his death.

The English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Schocken Books in 1948 in the collection The Penal Colony.

All of the individual stories in the collection have been translated previously by various translators.