Franz Kafka

“On a spring Sunday, a young merchant writes to an old friend in Russia to tell him of his engagement, and then goes to see his ageing father — who rises up in his bed and passes sentence on him.”

“A traveling salesman wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family slowly learns to live without him.”

“On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, the bank official Josef K. is arrested by an invisible court for a crime no one will name — and spends a year trying, and failing, to find out what he is accused of.”

“A land surveyor called K. arrives in a snowbound village, summoned — he says — by the castle above it; but the castle will neither admit him nor send him away, and he spends his days trying to reach the official Klamm.”

“Sent away to America by his parents at sixteen, Karl Rossmann lands in New York, finds a rich uncle, loses him, and is passed from job to job and from one false friend to another across a strange, vast, half-imagined America.”

“A Chinese scholar who worked on the Great Wall as a young man reflects on why it was built in pieces, with gaps never closed, by a high command no one has seen — and on an empire so vast that its villages worship emperors long dead.”

“In 1919, at thirty-six, Franz Kafka wrote a hundred-page letter to his father, Hermann, trying to explain why he was afraid of him — a portrait of a childhood, a family and a son, and an indictment that turns, again and again, into self-accusation.”

“In 1920, ill with tuberculosis in an Italian spa town, Franz Kafka began writing to his young Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, unhappily married in Vienna. For a few months they loved each other in letters; then Kafka's fear ended it. This is the story of that correspondence.”