Kafka's novels and stories fascinate readers and critics of each generation. Although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. This work aims to present a point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research.

The complete stories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. “An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.” —The New York Times The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. “[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” —from the Foreword by John Updike

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.

The Country Doctor Franz Kafka - The plot follows a country doctor's hapless struggle to attend a sick young boy on a cold winter's night. A series of surreal events occur in the process, including the appearance of a mysterious groom in a pig shed.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Prague hosted a cosmopolitan culture whose literary scene abounded in experimental writers. Two of the city’s natives are featured in this dual-language volume: Franz Kafka, whose fiction is synonymous with the anguish of modern life; and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose stories unfold in the same transcendent lyricism as his verse. Twelve of Kafka’s stories from the compilation Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor) appear here, along with two tales from Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist). Rilke's stories include "Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke" (The Ballad of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke), "Die Turnstunde" (The Gym Class), and Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Stories About the Good Lord). Stanley Appelbaum has provided an introduction and informative notes to these stories, along with excellent new English translations on the pages facing the original German.

In the first book to study Franz Kafka from the perspective of modern rhetorical theory, Clayton Koelb explores such questions as how Kafka understood the reading process, how he thematized the problematic of reading, and how his highly distinctive style relates to what Koelb describes as the "passion of reading."