Franz Kafka

Best remembered as skewering bureaucracy in his oeuvre "The Trial" as well as his shorter stories The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony and the humourous Amerika.

Born 3 July 1883 in Prague. Died 3 June 1924 in Kierling. Kafka is buried in the Prague-Straschnitz Jewish Cemetery (which is not the same as Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery, stary zdivsky hrbitov, in the city center).

His commentators have seen him as a precursor to existentialism. The scholar Gershom Scholem read the Kabbalah in and through Kafka, a fact of great signifance for contemporary Jewish thought. He has been read as a figure in psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism and just about any other modernist current of thought.

The Kafka bibliography reveals an immense corpus of work. Three published novels. Hundreds of letters to friends, family, and lovers. Kafka wrote thirteen quarto notebooks (posthumously published as his Diaries) and eight more octavo notebooks. He also wrote numerous short stories, parables, fragments, drafts, sketches, one piece of dramatic fiction.

Just a few themes in Kafka's works:

• Epistolary vampirism (see also Deleuze's work on Kafka)
• Judaism
• Linguistic Isolation
• What might be called the twist of Kafka's hand
• Solitude
• Marriage and Love

Works published during Kafka's lifetime:

• Betrachtung. Rowohlt Verlag, 1913
• Das Urteil (The Judgment). Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913
• Der Heizer. Ein Fragment. Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913
• Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915
• In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony). Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919
• Ein Landarzt. Kleine Erzahlungen. Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919
• Ein Hungerkunstler. Vier Geschichten. Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924

Kafka wrote three novels in his lifetime:

• The Trial (Der Prozess), published 1925
• The Castle (Das Schloss), published 1926
• America (Amerika), published 1927

Kafka's epistolary and private texts in English include:

• Letters to Milena (Briefe an Milena), published 1952
• Letters to Felice (Briefe an Felice), published 1967
• Letter to his Father (Brief an den Vater)
• Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
• Diaries, published 1948

The Complete selection of Kafka's short stories, excepting the fragments, given in English-language titles from the Schocken edition of The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka:

• Description of a Struggle
• Wedding Preparations in the Country
• The Judgment
• The Metamorphosis
• In the Penal Colony
• The Village Schoolmaster, or the Giant Mole
• Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor
• The Warden of the Tomb
• A Country Doctor
• The Hunter Gracchus
• The Great Wall of China
• A Report to an Academy
• The Refusal
• A Hunger Artist
• Investigations of a Dog
• A Little Woman
• The Burrow
• Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk
• The Problem of Our Laws

An incomplete list of the shorter fiction, parables and paradoxes, taken from The Complete Stories published by Schocken Books (see above):

• Before the Law
• An Imperial Message
• The Problem of Our Laws
• The Vulture

All English-language editions of Kafka's works are generally available through Schocken books.