At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings, and other activities.

This study offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. Kafka first studied chemistry at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague but after two weeks switched to law. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors. His stories include 'The Metamorphosis' (1912) and ' In the Penal Colony' (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).ĭespite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature. Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as ' The Metamorphosis' (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. It includes 'Metamorphosis', his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation 'Meditation', a collection of his earlier studies 'The Judgement', written in a single night of frenzied creativity 'The Stoker', the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia', Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories reveals the author’s extraordinary talent in a variety of forms-prose poems, short stories, sketches, allegories, and novelettes-and showcases the straight–faced humor, startling psychological insight, and haunting imagination for which he is revered as a modern master.

More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity. In the bizarre world of Franz Kafka, salesmen turn into giant bugs, apes give lectures at college academies, and nightmares probe the mysteries of modern humanity’s unhappiness.

The metamorphosis and other stories