“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., because he had done nothing wrong, but one day he was arrested…”

Vladimir Nabokov praised Kafka as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the depth of his extraordinary imagination has been so influential that the term “Kafkaesque” has become part of the English language.

W. H.Auden has said, “Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”

The Trial, his most famous work, is an exploration of horrific estrangement. Kafka has created the most absurd situation: a deeply disturbing account of a man placed at the mercy of blindly tyrannical law courts and a “justice system” out of control; where people are punished by the totalitarian state for actions such as 'thought-crime'.

The Trial is a deeply thought-provoking text and is often cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century.

FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924) was a leading German author of novels and short stories. His most influential works, The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, are filled with themes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations.