Some of these stories still resonate in my mind, fifty years after I first read them. The foreword by Joyce Carol Oates describes his his storytelling affected her writing. ( )

Save for a few good stories like In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis, The Warden of the Tomb, A Country Doctor and the Hunger Artist, these stories are torture. Kafka requested these to be burned for a reason. ( )

ramble on.

created stuff that creator has no intention of making public being made public, that's hard to judge.

I understood the implications of 'kafkaesque' before reading but now no longer do. ( )

With a deft hand and masterful skill, Franz Kafka creates worlds that mirror our own. Usually, an unexpected event will take the character out of their daily lives and cares, but in this case, it does not. Take The Metamorphosis for instance, a classic that is included in this volume. Grefor Samsa wakes up to find he is an insect of no mean size and goes back to sleep.

It is too bad that many of the stories in this volume are incomplete or missing entire sections of text. ( )

There’s nothing that hadn’t already been said. Discovering him is the embodiment of one of his own quotes: "A book must be the axe to the frozen sea within us." K is that axe. ( )