Collected Stories

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories, novels, diaries and letters in his brief lifetime. The present volume includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici. The stories, which range from tiny fragments to substantial narratives, have been arranged both to illuminate one another and to illustrate Kafka’s evolution as a writer – which, as Professor Josipovici shows, is more complex and radical than often thought. The prefatory essay is an introduction not only to the stories but also to Kafka’s work as a whole.

Author Biography

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.