Author
The Trial
Franz Kafka's The Trial follows Josef K., a senior bank clerk who is arrested one morning by officials who will not name his offence. He is then left free to go about his life while a vast, unreachable court closes in on him. Kafka wrote it in 1914–15 and left it unfinished. It appeared in 1925, after his death, and became one of the most influential works of modernist fiction. Its plain, controlled prose makes bureaucracy, guilt and authority feel both darkly comic and frightening. This Schocken Definitive Edition offers the Willa and Edwin Muir translation with an introduction by George Steiner. For anyone building a list of classic novels to read, it is a short, strange and endlessly debated place to start.