At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities.

This study offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but after two weeks switched to law. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors. His stories include 'The Metamorphosis' (1912) and ' In the Penal Colony' (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).ĭespite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature. Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as ' The Metamorphosis' (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poignant mood-pictures, while in the autobiographical Letter to his Father, Kafka analyses his difficult relationship in forensic and devastating detail.įor the 125th anniversary of Kafka's birth comes an astonishing new translation of his best-known stories, in a spectacular graphic package.

These three stories are flanked by two very different works. The third story, In the Penal Colony, explores questions of power, justice, punishment, and the meaning of pain in a colonial setting. The Judgement also concerns family tensions, when a power struggle between father and son ends with the father passing an enigmatic judgement on the helpless son. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments.

A commercial traveller is unexpectedly freed from his dreary job by his inexplicable transformation into an insect, which drastically alters his relationship with his family. With a bewildering blend of the everyday and the fantastical, Kafka thus begins his most famous short story, The Metamorphosis. 'When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.'

Metamorphosis and other stories