TRIAL, THE（ISBN=9780679409946）

Amazon.com Review
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral. --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

Review
"Kafka's 'legalese' is alchemically fused with a prose of great verve and intense readability."
--James Rolleston, professor of Germanic languages and literatures, Duke University
"Breon Mitchell's translation is an accomplishment of the highest order that will honor Kafka far into the twenty-first century."
--Walter Abish, author of How German Is It --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review
Praise for The Trial:

"Breon Mitchell's translation of the restored text is an accomplishment of the highest order -- one that will honor Kafka, perhaps the most singular and compelling writer of our time, far into the twenty-first century."
-- Walter Abish, author of How German Is It

Praise for The Castle:
translated by Mark Harman from the restored text

"The new Schocken edition of The Castle represents a major and long-awaited event in English- language publishing. It is a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Mark Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka's original manuscript."
-- Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University

"Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka's nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come."
-- J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"There is a great deal to applaud in Harman's translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka's uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English."
-- Robert Alter, The New Republic --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of the mysterious indictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K. in Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is one of the twentieth century's master parables, reflecting the central spiritual crises of modern life. Kafka's method-one that has influenced, in some way, almost every writer of substance who followed him-was to render the absurd and the terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperreal matter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby imparted to his work a level of seriousness normally associated with civilization's most cherished poems and religious texts. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) Czech-born German-speaking writer whose posthumously published novels express the alienation of 20th century man.