Kafka: The Complete Stories and Parables [B0070]

1983 Quality Paperback Club edition. The complete collection of Franz Kafka's short stories and parables. Per Wikipedia, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.

From Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Kafka's stories are witty, imaginative, and the perfect sort of eerie. Kafka writes about the subtle horror of being trapped in a system with opaque laws and a coded lack of regard for human well-being. Sometimes his characters break though the system, sometimes they resign to it's control over them."; "I think it's fair to say everyone ought to take a shot at reading Kafka. His total corpus of short prose does have a few stinkers and snoozers but that does not at all take away that when working at white heat, Kafka gave some truly great literature. In the whole collection, you probably will find some you don't like, but Kafka is an author who everyone ought to experience in at least some quantity."