Although we know Franz Kafka’s novel under the English title The Castle, it’s worth pointing out that we might also make a case for calling it ‘The Lock’: Schloss, in the novel’s original German title, means both ‘castle’ and ‘lock’. Kafka’s The Castle is about both a castle and about […]
‘A Hunger Artist’, published in 1922, is a short story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). The story is about a hunger artist in a circus who sits in a cage and fasts for weeks on end. However, after forty days have passed, the impresario who runs the circus always puts an […]
‘A Country Doctor’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). This short story, which Kafka wrote during the winter of 1916-17, tells of a country doctor who makes a visit to a nearby village to tend to a sick boy, but the […]
‘Before the Law’ is a short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he meets in […]
‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story, a man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man’s father […]