Franz Kafka: Short Stories

by Franz Kafka

This collection has Kafka's more than fifty best short stories. This is the most comprehensive and recent translation of Franz Kafka's stories. Scrupulously naturalistic on the surface, uncanny in their depths, these stories represent the achieved art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real. Few Stories which are part of this collections are; " Children On A Country Road", "The Tress", "Clothes", "The Way Home", "On The Tram", "A Dream", "Up In The Gallary", "Jackals and Arabs", "Eleven Sons", "At Night", "The Problem Of Our Laws", "The Test", "The Vulture", "The Married Couple", "Postscript".

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

113 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 30, 2020

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

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining listening 🎶🔰

This was a free novella e-book from Amazon.

This was not what I expected but interesting 👀 number of short stories. Give it a try it may work for you. 2023 👒😀☺😮

[Dikshyanta Uprety · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contained numerous famous short stories written by Franz Kafka. However, the two stories that stood out the most were "In the penal colony" and "The judgement". Kafka is leagues apart from other writers in two major aspects of writing. Firstly, he is extraordinarily adept at persistently centering characters around traits. For example, the officer in the penal colony is given a trait of dissatisfaction at losing his power so firmly held when he used to work under the previous commander. The character is given a unique resistance to change due to which he views the new bureaucracy with utter disdain. Kafka uses dialogues, expression and actions to constantly assign these traits to these characters with greater intensity.

Secondly, he is able to display any changes to characters with equal grandeur and agility. Metamorphosis is a cutting contrast to all the other stories whereby however, characters are provided with changing traits. The main character's sister who is given such a loving persona at the beginning of the story is completely morphed into a spiteful character towards the end, who vehemently argues the family to get rid of the brother who she stood so firmly for in the beginning. Even the protagonist's feelings suffer a drastic shift when his pity for the family and a sense of pride of belonging changes to disdain and feelings of estrangement in the latter part of the story.

[Mary Ellen Gambutti]

Classics.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Kafkaesque

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

bracho.