The Trial (Legend Classics)

Franz Kafka

Aug 2021 · Legend Press

About this ebook

Part of the Legend Classics series

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

A novel of such ambiguity will inevitably lend itself to a diversity of interpretation, but in The Trial you can at least be sure to find every element of storytelling now defined as Kafkaesque.

Josef K., our protagonist, is unexpectedly arrested on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. The agents who arrest him are unidentified, the agency they work for is unspecified, and the crime for which he has been accused is unknown. When he is released, shortly after, he is told to await further instruction. So begins the manic and emotionless trial of a man beholden to the whims of an unknown force, and his painstaking attempts to find a way out of this existential maze.

The Trial brings into focus the absurdity of life, our universal fear of judgement, and one ultimate question: how much of this endless maze will you explore before you accept the fate life has bestowed upon you?

The Legend Classics series:
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Importance of Being Earnest
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Metamorphosis
The Railway Children
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Frankenstein
Wuthering Heights
Three Men in a Boat
The Time Machine
Little Women
Anne of Green Gables
The Jungle Book
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
Dracula
A Study in Scarlet
Leaves of Grass
The Secret Garden
The War of the Worlds
A Christmas Carol
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Heart of Darkness
The Scarlet Letter
This Side of Paradise
Oliver Twist
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Treasure Island
The Turn of the Screw
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Emma
The Trial
A Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Grimm Fairy Tales

About the author

Kafka left behind explicit instructions in the event of his death: every piece of writing is "to be burned unread". We can only imagine what the landscape of literature would look like today had they followed his request. He is now regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century, inspiring the likes of W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, J. D. Salinger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It is rumoured that Kafka's lover also ignored his request, and secretly kept twenty notebooks and thirty-five letters. Scholars continue to search for them.