Franz Kafka Collected editions

Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian writer whose haunting, surreal narratives have become a defining voice of 20th-century literature. Blending the ordinary with the absurd, Kafka explored themes of alienation, bureaucracy, and the elusive search for meaning, creating works that feel at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

His most renowned writings — including The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle — portray protagonists trapped in bewildering, oppressive systems, reflecting both modern existential anxiety and the fragility of human agency.

A reserved and introspective figure, Kafka published little during his lifetime, instructing that his manuscripts be destroyed upon his death — a wish famously ignored by his friend Max Brod. Today, Franz Kafka is celebrated as one of the most influential writers of the modern era, his name immortalized in the adjective “Kafkaesque,” denoting the strange, unsettling logic of a world both familiar and unrecognizable.