'Had one to name an author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of' - W. H. Auden
Malcolm Pasley's translations, together with those in a forthcoming companion volume, The Transformation ('Metamorphosis') and Other Stories, are distinctive in that they illuminate Kafka's life as well as his art by presenting the works in the sequence in which they were written. Unlike other editions popularly available, this one has been prepared directly from the author's manuscripts. In its fidelity to the text it vastly alters our received versions of many of Kafka's greatest works, besides correcting numerous errors of detail.
This volume contains the major short works left by Kafka, including Blumfeld, and Elderly Bachelor, The Great Wall of China and Investigations of a Dog, together with The Collected Aphorisms and He: Aphorisms from the 1920 Diary.
