"Franz Kafka: The Office Writings" brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and, letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings team with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.

Comme chaque matin, Gregor, employé modèle, s'apprête à partir au travail, lorsqu'il s'aperçoit que son corps est doté d'une lugubre carapace de coléoptère. Il croit d'abord à un mauvais rêve, mais la métamorphose est bien réelle. Sa famille effarée le séquestre dans sa chambre. Les locataires fuient l'appartement, c'est alors que sa sur annonce qu'il faut soit le tuer, soit l'expulser du logis... La métamorphose de Gregor en insecte se déroule à l'ouverture du récit et n'est pas expliquée. Kafka prend pour prétexte cet événement extraordinaire afin d'explorer la transformation qui se déroule au sein de la famille. Le père apathique devient vigoureux, alors que la sur aimante prend en main extermination de son frère. Cette nouvelle évoque le traitement social subi par ceux qui sont différents.

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to Hermann Kafka in November 1919; he was then thirty-six years old. Max Brod relates that Kafka actually gave it to his mother to hand to his father, hoping that it might renew a relationship that had disintegrated into tension and frustration on both sides. Kafka's probing of the abyss between them spared neither his father nor himself, and his cry for acceptance has an undertone of despair. He could not help seeing the lack of understanding between father and son as another moment in the universal predicament depicited in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son's gesture, his mother did not deliver the letter, but returned it to Kafka instead. Kafka died five years later, in 1924, of tuberculosis.

Synopsis
Arranged chronologically, this volume brings together all the major short stories of Kafka which have been published posthumously. In addition to "Transformation" and "The Judgement", it contains the original first chapters of Kafka''s novel "Amerika (The Stoker)".
Book Dimension
length: (cm)19.7 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.8

Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman

Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.

This letter is the closest that Kafka came to setting down his autobiography. He was driven to write it by his father's opposition to his engagement with Julie Wohryzek. The marriage did not take place; the letter was not delivered.

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it. In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.

中篇小說《審判》標誌著卡夫卡獨特藝術風格的形成。小說描寫一個銀行職員突然被祕密法庭宣佈逮捕，卻未宣佈他的罪狀，而且行動仍然自由。他自知無罪，只好四處奔走，託人說情。但不管是什麼人，只要被法庭起訴，要想擺脫是難乎其難的事。小說的最後，兩個黑衣人在一個晚上把他架走，並且祕密處死。
卡夫卡的藝術手法是多方面的，他善於通過奇妙的構思勾勒出誇張和荒誕的畫面，把現實與非現實，合理與悖理，常人與非人並列在一起，把虛妄的離奇荒誕現象與現實的本質真實有機地結合起來，加上他那不帶任何感情色彩的純客觀敘述方式，構成了獨特的「卡夫卡式」的藝術風格。

Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.
As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”