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On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecifi ed crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. fi nds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefi guration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.
About the author
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of the best-known writers in the German language. He is especially famous for
The Metamorphosis,
The Trial,
and
The Castle, as well as his many shorter works. He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
Summary
This new edition of Kafka's The Trial includes a comprehensive selection of extra material, including notes on the text, pictures and a section on Kafka's life and works.
