Editions

The Burrow

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241372593

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 179g

  • RRP: £9.99

The Burrow

  • Posthumously Published Short Fiction

A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening and visionary short fiction

Strange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Some are less than a page long, others more substantial; all were unpublished in his lifetime. These matchless short works range from the gleeful miniature horror 'Little Fable' to the off-kilter humour of 'Investigations of a Dog', and from the elaborate waking nightmare of 'Building the Great Wall of China' to the creeping unease of 'The Burrow', where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241372593

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 179g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • A superb translation... alerts us to the strangeness of Kafka's world - often funnier or happier than we give it credit for - without using the word "Kafkaesque", which should be retired as it now means little more than "frustratingly bureaucratic". Kafka's world is richer, and more rewarding than that.

    Nick Lezard, Guardian

  • Kafka's posthumously published short fiction cry out for a critical exegesis... newly translated by Michael Hofmann, the stories collected in The Burrow mingle dark comedy with a proto-surrealist intent to unsettle...excellent new translations

    Ian Thomson, New Statesman

  • Hofmann, with his taste for mischief, makes Kafka, often translated in a buttoned-up key, a writer capable of blending old-fashioned literary parlance and contemporary media-speak... the modern touches also emphasise the timelessness of Kafka's themes, the horror of institutions being just one of them.

    Anna Aslanyan, Financial Times

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About the Author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

Franz Kafka

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Extracts

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka audiobook

Benedict Cumberbatch reads Franz Kafka's classic dark tale.

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