From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--his collected stories including the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," and "A Hunger Artist" along with shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, released after Kafka's death. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.

The collection includes all of Kafka's available shorter fiction, edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that bring out the writer's extraordinary range and intensity of vision.

Franz Kafka's imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales. 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.