This collection of Franz Kafka's works was published in 1952, and incorporates English translations dating back to the 1930s. The collection 15 of Kafka's works of fiction, including four well-known classics -- "The Judgment", "The Metamorphosis", "The Penal Colony", and "The Hunger Artist". Also included are the following: "The Great Wall of China", "A Country Doctor" (the short story, not the collection that bears that title), "A Report to an Academy", "The Hunter Gracchus", "Investigations of a Dog, "The Burrow", and "Josephine the Singer or the Mouse Folk". Still others are the short works "A Common Confusion", "The New Advocate", "An Old Manuscript" and "A Fratricide." Most of these works were published during Kafka's lifetime. Five were published posthumously ("The Hunter Gracchus", "A Common Confusion", The Great Wall of China" The Burrow", and "Investigations of a Dog"), and of these, four pieces (all but "A Common Confusion" were incomplete. The collection is introduced with a 14 page essay by Philip Rahv.

The English translations were done by Willa and Edwin Muir, and some sources consider them to be inferior to more recent translations. I found Philip Rahv's essay to have a few interesting insights. As he describes, it Kafka's "idiosyncratic but powerful sensibility has entered the bloodstream of twentieth-century literature." Kafka (he states) is "an artist of neurosis", i.e., that he "succeeds in objectifying through imaginative means the states of mind typical of neurosis and hence in incorporating his private world into the public world we all live in..." and that he thereby "has exorcised his demon, freed himself of his personal burden..." Kafka's obsession (he avers) "was an inordinate sense of inadequacy, failure, and sinfulness... lodged in the innermost recesses of his being.."; that he was plagued with "nerve-destroying fears and sense of unworthiness."

While this collection of Kafka's works is less complete than some, it does include his best-known short works as well as a number of more obscure items. For my part, I found "The Judgment", "The Metamorphosis" (with its tragi-comedic perspective), and "The Hunger Artist" the most compelling, and "The Penal Colony" the most disturbing and disgusting. The other selections, to my reading, are tedious, opaque, and perplexing -- the latter two features of which provide much fodder for divergent and mutually contradictory literary interpretation.

Overall, this is a good introduction to Kafka's short works, but (based on judgments of some Kafka scholars), not as good as more recent translations of his works. Few general readers are likely to find more than 4 of the selections of much interest. ( )

Kafka-esque has come to be associated with "The Metamorphosis" i.e., waking up one day to find you're a giant bug. Something surreal and horrifying. If it had come from the stories "Investigations of a Dog" or "The Burrow," it may well have come to mean tedious in the extreme. Not that those stories weren't a Kind of cool and bizarre too, but They were very slow. I was surprised Kafka had so many animal stories. They were almost cute. One would think I was the perfect audience for the "Investigations of a Dog." I love dogs; I love anthropomorphic animal stories in general (there are also a horse-lawyer, a talking ape and a singing mouse in the collection), but it just went on too long and too philosophical and vague and I had to put it down several times and it was hard to pick up again. "The Burrow" was slightly easier. The burrower's problems were much easier to comprehend than the dog's. Which in a way made the dog more interesting, but "The Burrow" slightly less tedious. All the other stories were pretty amazing. I love "The Metamorphosis." "In the Penal Colony" is harrowing. "The Great Wall of China" might be a tad tedious too, but is generally shorter and slightly better paced, so it doesn't come off so slow. The shorter pieces are fantastic bizarre little windows into Kafka's crazy world. So highly recommended, overall. ( )

There are writers who can only be taken seriously by being taken a little less seriously. David Foster Wallace brilliantly recognized this about Kafka. He suggests that the most familiar stories are “radical literalizations” of truths we tend to think of as metaphorical (“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness”): ”The Metamorphosis” (“what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as creepy or gross, or say that he is forced to take shit as part of his job”), “In the Penal Colony” (“expressions like tongue-lashing or tore him a new asshole”), and “A Hunger Artist” (“tropes like starved for attention or love-starved or the double entendre in the term self-denial, or…the etymological root of anorexia [is] …the Greek word for longing”). And John Updike reminds us in his foreword to The Complete Stories that Kafka, reading his stories aloud to his friends, sometimes laughed so hard he could not continue.
Philip Rahv introduces this Modern Library edition; he makes a lot of the autobiographical elements of father-son conflict in “The Judgment” (an invalid father pronounces a death sentence on his son, which the son then executes on himself) and “The Metamorphosis” and says Kafka’s achievement was his combination of “the recognizable and mysterious, extreme subjectivity of content with forms rigorously objective, a lovingly exact portrayal of the factual world with a dreamlike and magical dissolution of it.” He writes in 1952, before a name was given to magical realism.
Updike says Kafka’s work is drenched in some features of modern anomie: a sense of anxiety and shame without a specific cause, a feeling that everything is immensely difficult, and an abnormal sensitivity as of exposed nerve endings.
This Modern Library edition, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, has fifteen stories, including, besides the ones already mentioned, the very short pieces “A Common Confusion” (a nightmarish inability to connect with someone with whom we are trying to meet), “The New Advocate” (Alexander’s Bucephalus is now working in the law courts), “An Old Manuscript” (“the nomads from the North have taken over the narrator’s town) and “A Fratricide.” Aside from “The Metamorphosis” and “The New Advocate,” animals figure in and narrate a number of stories. “The Burrow” is described from the point of view of the burrowing, unnamed animal; in “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” the mouse narrator is ambivalent about the value of Josephine , the only mouse who has ever been able to sing, to their community; an ape records his progress from apishness to humanness in “A Report to an Academy”; and “Investigations of a Dog” is an epistemological romp in which the dog in question tries to find out about his world, apparently unaware that his food, for instance, comes from humans…unaware, in fact, that there are such things as humans. “The Great Wall of China” was apparently designed by those almost incredibly remote in distance, authority, and time, to have gaps, even though these obviously give entry to those pesky nomads from the North. “A Country Doctor” doesn’t seem able to control much of what happens to his servant girl or his patient. Finally, “The Hunter Gracchus,” though dead, has conversations about his life and death with the Burgomaster of Riva, who has come to visit his bier on board a boat in the harbor. ( )

This is a collection of Kafka's short works, including "The Hunger Artist," "Metamorphosis," "The Penal Colony" and "The Burrow". Kafka was, of course, a masterful author. These are all quite unique, rather depressing, artistically told tales; they were all enjoyable to read. I found his tendency to use animals to enact human phobias and neuroses interesting. I hadn't realized he used the device quite so often. His style is a little difficult at times; it's very unique, and has a very particular rhythm. There aren't many authors as recognizable as Kafka. 328 pgs
10/10 ( )

Selected Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka