The Trial

From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term "Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment - based on an undisclosed charge - in a maze of bureaucratic roadblocks. This is the least expensive edition available of one of the 20th century's most important novels. Franz Kafka was born July 3, 1883, into a middle class Prague Jewish family. He received his law degree in 1906 and went to work for an insurance agency, while writing on the side. In 1917, he began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family. In 1923, he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. His tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, and then went to a sanatorium near Vienna for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924.