The Trial: The Original 1925 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Franz Kafka Classics)

The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published
posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story
of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible
authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the
reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The
Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood
relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was
never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the
story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his
friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by
Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern
Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language
translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book
was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best
German Novels of the Twentieth Century.