The Trial

Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka's death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. Review. "'[I]t seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.' With these words The Trial ends. Kafka's shame then is no more personal than the life and thought which govern it and which he describes thus: 'He does not live for the sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he cannot be released.'" --Walter Benjamin "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 From the Inside Flap. 914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. But until this edition, English-speaking readers have been able to read Kafka's masterpiece only in a translation of the 1925 German edition that was edited by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, from an unfinished manuscript. Both Brod's edition and its 1937 translation by Willa and Edwin Muir have long been considered flawed. This new edition is based upon the widely acclaimed work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and the