The Originals: Franz Kafka Selected Works - Om Books

Franz Kafka’s short stories—shocking, complex, intriguing, and unsettling—show him at the height of his writing prowess. Kafka takes on universal themes such as guilt, isolation, alienation, self-expression, cruelty, judgement, shame, sin, and redemption in them. Hovering between dream and reality, his dark and brilliantly crafted stories are populated by both humans and animals. They are intense, enigmatic, filled with generous doses of irony and horror that inspire the reader to search for meaning in the world’s maze. This collection features an impressive clutch of his short stories including In ‘The Penal Colony’, ‘The Hunger Artist’, ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘The Burrow’, ‘The Judgment’, ‘Before the Law’, ‘A Country Doctor’, and ‘ The Great Wall of China’. ‘ The Penal Colony’ is seeped in the dehumanising horror of WWI and it mixes the dazzle of modern technological advances with the barbarism of archaic, absolute law. ‘The Metamorphosis’ in which the alienated hero turns into an insect is an exquisite study of the human condition. The characters in Kafka’s stories are hunted and haunted, wandering in a world governed by forces beyond their control.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic). His father was a middle-class businessman, an extremely domineering parent who disapproved of Kafka’s fondness for literature. His mother Julie was better educated than his father. Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law in 1906 and worked for a year as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. From 1908–1922, he worked with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His influential works (originally written in the German) such as the novels The Trial (1925) in which a man is charged with an unnamed offence, and The Metamorphosis (1915) in which the hero is transformed into an insect, mirror the alienation and anxiety experienced by many in the 20th century. Kafka allowed very few of his writings to be published while he was alive. Most of his critically lauded novels and stories appeared in print only after his death. He became an important figure of German and world literature when his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, refused to destroy his novels, diaries and letters upon his death, as was instructed by Kafka.