This is the most comprehensive and recent translation of Franz Kafka's stories, including short and long tales: the most renowned, as well as many that are less known to the broader audience. With all previous major English translations dating as far back as well before World War Two, the refreshing effort to bring Kafka anew to today's readers was long overdue. Rendered with absolute faithfulness to the original German text (also presented in this book), and with a language that is fully comprehensible to the twenty first century English speaking audience, the tantalizing modernity of Kafka's work compels us to delve into our sense of annihilation, the one of the individual before the overwhelming mechanisms of power, existence, and social relations.

This is the most comprehensive and recent translation of Franz Kafka's stories, including short and long tales: the most renowned, as well as many that are less known to the broader audience. With all previous major English translations dating as far back as well before World War Two, the refreshing effort to bring Kafka anew to today's readers was long overdue.Rendered with absolute faithfulness to the original German text (also presented in this book), and with a language that is fully comprehensible to the twenty first century English speaking audience, the tantalizing modernity of Kafka's work compels us to delve into our sense of annihilation, the one of the individual before the overwhelming mechanisms of power, existence, and social relations.

DIVFive great stories in original German with new, literal English translations on facing pages: "The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor" and "A Report to an Academy." /div

The Metamorphosis (German, Die Verwandlung), a novella by Franz Kafka is cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. This edition contains both the original German together with a parallel translation in English for easy study and cross-reference. Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Gregor's transformation is never revealed, and Kafka himself never gave an explanation. The novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become.

In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose--including works published in the author's brief lifetime, posthumously published stories, journals, and letters--for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's signature stories, "Die Verwandlung," commonly rendered in English as "The Metamorphosis." Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrums also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the Twentieth Century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers. Contents: • Words are Miserable Miners of Meaning • Letter to Ernst Rowohlt • Reflections • Concerning Parables • Children on the Country Road • The Spinning Top • The Street-Side Window • At Night • Unhappiness • Clothes Make the Man • On the Inability to Write • From Somewhere in the Middle • I Can Also Laugh • The Need to Be Alone • So I Sat at My Stately Desk • A Writer's Quandary • Give it Up! • Eleven Sons • Paris Outing • The Bridge • The Trees • The Truth About Sancho Pansa • The Silence of the Sirens • Prometheus • Poseidon • The Municipal Coat of Arms • A Message from the Emperor • The Next Village Over • First Sorrow • The Hunger Artist • Josephine, Our Meistersinger, or the Music of Mice • Investigations of a Dog • A Report to an Academy • A Hybrid • Transformed • In the Penal Colony • From The Burrow • Selected Aphorisms • Selected Last Conversation Shreds • In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka (An Afterword) • The Back of Words (A Post Script)

"Investigations of a Dog" (German: "Forschungen eines Hundes") is a short story by Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924) written in 1922. It was published posthumously in 1931. Kafka wanted his unfinished manuscripts to be destroyed by his friend Max Brod, who nonetheless published them after Kafka's death, including this one. In "Investigations of a Dog," a dog tells of his attempts to make sense of his life and condition in the most rational and scientific manner of which he is capable. The reader knows things that the dog in his limited understanding cannot grasp, which creates dramatic irony. With numerous self-contradictory statements by the dog and hilarious word choices (for example, mentioning scientific pursuits and basest body functions in one breath), the story presents a humorous and timelessly valid reflection on anthropocentrism and scientific hubris. And when you take your dog for a walk next time, you may be less impatient when it insists on lots of conscientious inspection in selecting the best place for watering the ground. In contrast to previous efforts, the present translation attempts to transport Kafka's poetically plain language into modern usage, avoiding Latinate terminology that would lend the text pretensions that the original simply does not have. This "translator edition" offers the original German text side by side with the new translation. Learners of the language can use it to improve their reading skills, students of literature can read the original and have a translation at hand for reference, and people interested in translation can evaluate strategies and choices. The foreword discusses the translation process and looks at challenges of literature translation in general as well as the translation of this story in particular.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”