 First edition dust jacket (1925) | |
| Author | Franz Kafka |
|---|---|
| Original title | Der Prozess |
| Language | German |
| Genre | |
| Set in | A city in Central Europe |
| Publisher | Verlag Die Schmiede, Berlin |
Publication date | 26 April 1925 |
| Media type | Print: hardback |
| 833.912 | |
| LC Class | PT2621.A26 P713 |
Original text | Der Prozess at German Wikisource |
| Website | www |
The Trial (German: Der Prozess)[A] 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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
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- ^ Bridgwater, Patrick (2003). Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 9–12. ISBN 978-90-420-1194-6.
- ^ Coetzee, J. M. (14 May 1998). "Kafka: Translators on Trial". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 22 May 2015.