Best Short Stories: A Dual-Language Book

by Franz Kafka

Students of German language and literature will welcome this dual-language edition of five stories by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Considered one of the greatest modern writers, Kafka wrote tales that brilliantly explore the anxiety, futility, and complexity of modern life.
The stories in this volume are "The Metamorphosis" (thought by many critics to be Kafka's most perfect work), "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and "A Report to an Academy." Along with the original German texts, Stanley Applebaum has provided accurate English translations on facing pages, affording students an ideal opportunity to read some of Kafka's finest stories in the original, to discover the passion and profundity of this extremely important figure in modern European literature, and to upgrade their German language skills.

Genres: German Literature, Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, Language

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka grew up amid German, Czech, and Jewish cultural influences that shaped his sense of displacement and linguistic precision. His difficult relationship with his authoritarian father left a lasting mark, fostering feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inadequacy that became central themes in his fiction and personal writings.
Kafka studied law at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1906. He chose law for practical reasons rather than personal inclination, a compromise that troubled him throughout his life. After university, he worked for several insurance institutions, most notably the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties included assessing industrial accidents and drafting legal reports, work he carried out competently and responsibly. Nevertheless, Kafka regarded his professional life as an obstacle to his true vocation, and most of his writing was done at night or during periods of illness and leave. Kafka began publishing short prose pieces in his early adulthood, later collected in volumes such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor. These works attracted little attention at the time but already displayed the hallmarks of his mature style, including precise language, emotional restraint, and the application of calm logic to deeply unsettling situations. His major novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were left unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. They depict protagonists trapped within opaque systems of authority, facing accusations, rules, or hierarchies that remain unexplained and unreachable. Themes of alienation, guilt, bureaucracy, law, and punishment run throughout Kafka’s work. His characters often respond to absurd or terrifying circumstances with obedience or resignation, reflecting his own conflicted relationship with authority and obligation. Kafka’s prose avoids overt symbolism, yet his narratives function as powerful metaphors through structure, repetition, and tone. Ordinary environments gradually become nightmarish without losing their internal coherence. Kafka’s personal life was marked by emotional conflict, chronic self-doubt, and recurring illness. He formed intense but troubled romantic relationships, including engagements that he repeatedly broke off, fearing that marriage would interfere with his writing. His extensive correspondence and diaries reveal a relentless self-critic, deeply concerned with morality, spirituality, and the demands of artistic integrity. In his later years, Kafka’s health deteriorated due to tuberculosis, forcing him to withdraw from work and spend long periods in sanatoriums. Despite his illness, he continued writing when possible. He died young, leaving behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. Before his death, he instructed his close friend Max Brod to destroy all of his remaining work. Brod ignored this request and instead edited and published Kafka’s novels, stories, and diaries, ensuring his posthumous reputation.
The publication of Kafka’s work after his death established him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The term Kafkaesque entered common usage to describe situations marked by oppressive bureaucracy, absurd logic, and existential anxiety. His writing has been interpreted through existential, religious, psychological, and political perspectives, though Kafka himself resisted definitive meanings. His enduring power lies in his ability to articulate modern anxiety with clarity and restraint.

Reviews

[David Cerruti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to find this audiobook. Who better to read Kafka than Lotte Lenya? Both were born in Austria-Hungary in the late 1800’s. I imagined traces of Cabaret and Kurt Weill coming through in the reading. Alas, it was disappointing. Her dynamic range, well suited to the stage, didn’t work in this reading. The whispers were inaudible, and the shouts were jolting. The recording engineer could have corrected this, but didn’t.

The five stories are separated by long low-fidelity musical interludes. Both Goodreads and Audible list a 2011 publication date. Lotte Leyna died in 1981. The recording date is not given.

I liked the stories. Four stars for the writing, two stars for the recording, average to a three star rating.

[Chris Hay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read 3/5 stories: The Judgement, The Metamorphosis, and In The Penal Colony. The second "Die Verwandlung" was most interesting to me. Overall lots of gore, violence, and irrational people. Occasionally there would be a light or hopeful moment which I felt I had to hold onto.

I tried reading both languages page by page. It was a bit beyond my level but still somewhat useful and a fun experiment.

[Gastjäle · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Die Verwandlung" fortsetzt neue Einzelheiten zu geben. Diesmal achtete ich mehr die Situation zu Hause Gregors auf: es wirkt dass auch wenn Gregor seine Familie finanziell unterstützte und ihr Leben gemütlich machen versuchte, das Ergebnis davon war, dass die Familie ist nur dadurch abhängig und gelähmt worden. Also zwar die Verwandlung Gregors den Verwandten für viel Mühe und Trauer sorgte, ermöglichte es auch Greta und dem Vater Arbeit zu schaffen, neue Fähigkeiten zu lernen und Selbstvertrauen zu entwickeln. Es war als ob beide die vorherigen und derzeitigen Zustände Gregors eine gemeinsame Krankheit der ganzen Familie wäre. Und diese Angelegenheit macht die Erzählung noch mehr tragisch: wie sein Zimmer ihn, einschränkte Gregor die Familie, und wann die Geschichte mit dem Wort "dehnte" sich beendet, es kommt mit einer geilen Mischung von Bitterkeit und Erleichterung.

Die andere Erzählungen waren auch wunderbar, aber mit meinem Deutsch kann ich darüber nur kurz schrieben. "Das Urteil" erzählt auch von einem ähnliche Verlust von Autorität und Sicherkeit, sowie von einer plötzlichen Umkehrung in dem Vater-Sohn-Verhältnis. "In der Strafkolonie" ist mehr seltsam: eine Geschichte über einen hoffnungslösen Exekutionsversuch, in dem Kafka spielt mit moralischen Unentschlossenheit von einer christusähnlichen Figur. "Der Landartz" scheint mir als ein Fiebertraum und "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" ist eine humorvolle Kurzgeschichte von Animalität und Freiheit. Wie üblich, sind die Erzählungen lecker und unbestimmt, und man sollte sie nicht so reduzieren.

[Shannon Dyce · Rating 1 out of 5]

1/4 star. I ran across a Franz Kafka quote that I liked. "Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination." I had never heard of Kafka, let alone had I ever read one of his books. But, the quote made me want to read one of his books. I picked one of his highest-rated books on Goodreads, and I checked out an audio edition of this book from the library. The production of the audiobook is brutal. Randomly for the first 40% of the audio, there is loud music playing in the background as the book was read aloud at the same time. The book's narrator has a strong accent, making it difficult to understand the words contrasted against the loud music. It was a train wreck, yet I persisted. In my head, it was the equivalent of going to a movie, and randomly, for the first 40% of the show, there are one-foot-tall captioning words covering the entire screen with the movie playing only behind the huge letters. Why would you do that? I didn't catch over the noise of the music why the hunger artist was in prison, the end.

Notable quote:

"hunger artist"

Vocabulary word:
Fasting

[zunggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five Kafka stories in a parallel text edition with very competent, user-friendly translations. It was an intense thrill to read Kafka in German (although I'd have struggled abysmally without the English to hand) and I didn't find K's style as convoluted as I had been led to believe it was. I have read all his stories before in translation, but of these five (The Judgement, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Country Doctor, A Report to an Academy), it was "A Country Doctor" that impressed me the most this time around with its out-of-control narrative and increasingly hallucinatory tone.

[Inrisrini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes, I think great authors will write something not for common people like us. They always write what they felt / thought / imagined as it is. To grasp the same in the same level is not always possible for all of us. Hence we think, it is not our coup of tea.

It happened with me with few books I read, one of is this one. Where I tried to focus on what I want to picture from the words, but I lost myself in words than making it as complete picture.

So it is my limit.

[Safa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The selection of stories was fantastic and the voice acting was exceptional. Lotte Lenya breathed new life into these classic stories. The perfect audiobook to listen to on a walk in snowy, gray Berlin. Just be sure to lower the volume for the final story as the sudden shouts may hurt your ears otherwise.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Kafka. His writing is so timeless, gritty and, at times, hopeless. Not a light read.

"The Hunger Artist" really stuck with me. But all of these were fascinating to listen to, in the audiobook format. I always need time to digest each story before going on to the next one. This is one I'll probably come back to in a few years.

[Tori · Rating 2 out of 5]

The audiobook felt overproduced (In a less than hour long book, there's probably at least 5 minutes of transition music in here, and the narrator was over the top to the point it was sometimes hard to understand the words), and it distracted more than added to the stories. A Hunger Artist was the story that stood out.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back to the Classics 2022 - Short Story Collection
As expected, some of the stories I liked better than others. The Hunger Artist has left the most impression on me, oddly enough since I can't imagine that it is an occupation I'd ever want.

[I-Lin]

“Nein, Freiheit wollte ich nicht. Nur einen Ausweg;...” (182)

[Jason Garrett · Rating 1 out of 5]

The audio sounds like an old cassette. It was very challenging to listen to in the car.

[James M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audio book. Dramatic music and reading. Somewhat hard to follow the stories.

[Jasmin]

DNF at 34%. Absolutely could not pay attention to the audio of this at this time. May try again another time and will try via hard copy when I can get my hands on a copy.

[Label Lost · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibile, gets right under your skin. Not advisable for people prone to depression, though... He WILL get you down.

[Ian Rogers · Rating 2 out of 5]

The entire point of a dual language version is to compare the text. I realize you can't do facing pages on a Kindle but maybe alternating paragraphs would be good. What did this publisher do? The ENTIRE German version of each story, then the ENTIRE English version. The only reason I give it 2 stars is that it's still Kafka. Whoever thought this would be a good adaptation to the Kindle platform should be fired, and I regret spending my money on it. Dover is a really good print version publisher, and I have many of their books including a dual-language edition of some French poems - I expected more and am quite peeved. Save your money and dig up a used copy in the print version.

[Sowmya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The single biggest regret I have with translations is about my inability to read the book in its original form. The translation is perfect, then again, what else do I know? I have no yardstick to evaluate otherwise.

'In The Penal Colony' is my favorite. A suspense-thriller with all the distinct, gripping characters. Doesn't stop there. The narrative is more gripping. Ending as well.

It's a shame I have no German friends. This book had to be returned with grief, a whining heart and was definitely under-used.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend listening to the Audiobook version of this book. It was a relatively short audiobook, about an hour. The music between the stories adds greatly to the experience. The narrator has a strong Hungarian accent which can be a bit difficult to understand if you are doing another task while listening. Overall, I enjoyed listening to the stories and purchased another Kafka audiobook.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing- I really enjoyed In the Penal Colony/In der Strafkolonie and the book as a whole is great!