Trial »

Franz Kafka was one of the most significant and influential fiction writers of the 20th century. Dark, absurdist, and existential, his stories and novels concern the struggles of troubled individuals to survive in an impersonal, bureaucratic world.

From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term "Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment in a bureaucratic maze, based on an undisclosed charge.

Books of the Century; New York Times review, October 1937 - Louis Kronenberger

The Trial is not for everybody, and its peculiar air of excitement will seem flat enough to those who habitually feed on 'exciting' books. It belongs not with the many novels that horrify, but with the many fewer which terrify.