Author(s): Franz Kafka , Transl: Michael Hofmann

Fiction

Description: Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka's lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in "Little Fable" to the absurd humor of "Investigations of a Dog," from the elaborate waking nightmare of "Building the Great Wall of China" to the creeping unease of "The Burrow," where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

Review: "Hofmann's translation is invaluable-it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'" -- New Republic "Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann." -- The New York Times Book Review "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." -- John Updike "Of course I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable people do." -- Jorge Luis Borges

Author Biography: Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. For his translations, acclaimed poet Michael Hofmann has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Dublin International IMPAC Award, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and The Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times). He is the highly acclaimed translator of, among others, Kafka, Brecht, and Joseph Roth.