The Trial (Kafka Centennial Edition)

"This is a mistake. How can anyone be guilty?"

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

A trial humanity cannot avoid, its crime unknown

Kafka Centennial Original Manuscript Commemorative Edition

"Someone must have been slandering Josef K., for without having done anything truly wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

Josef K. is accused at home, thus beginning a series of confrontations and defeats with the court. His family fears he will become a disgrace to them; his appointed lawyer never completes the first plea; those who intercede for K. tell him that no defendant is innocent, and no one has ever been truly acquitted. K. is unforgivably guilty, yet he never knows his crimes...

The Trial is an unfinished work by Kafka, written based on the contradictions and suffering in his personal emotional relationships. This book is based on a reconstructed critical edition of the original manuscript, preserving the original spelling and punctuation, restoring parts modified and deleted by Kafka's close friend Max Brod, and including unfinished fragments, hoping to faithfully present the original text and lead readers to experience the human predicament depicted by Kafka.

◆Special Introduction — Chung Ying-Yen, Professor, Department of German Language and Culture, Tamkang University

"It seems we can consider the arrest in The Trial to reflect Kafka's engagement to Felice, and the breaking of the engagement to be K.'s execution."

◆Special Feature — Polish Edition Introduction by Bruno Schulz, Author of Street of Crocodiles

"Irony, metamorphosis, absurdity... In Kafka's mind, the sublime nature of the divine world could not be expressed in any other way—it could only be expressed as a powerful force that negated the human world."