I'd read some of the works collected here before--most notably "The Hunger Artist" and "The Metamorphosis"--and rereading them was a clear reminder of why and how they've stuck with me all these years. Kafka's sideways examination of the human condition, and social contracts and understandings, is as powerful and striking as ever, smartly written and driven forward with such intention as to be near other-worldly. Somehow, it's still "The Hunger Artist" that draws me back again and again as a heartbreaking and yet ever-meaningful story. But on this read, going through the whole of the collection, I also was left speechless by a number of other stories of Kakfa's which I'd not gotten around to reading before--especially "The Stoker", "A Report for an Academy", and "First Sorrow." I'm sure I'll be returning to this collection. ( )

Minus a star for the Meditations, which are nearly all drafts only of interest to completists. Baffling that they were published.

The shorts ranked:
1. A Little Woman
2. Jackals and Arabs
3. A Report to an Academy
4. An Old Manuscript
5. An Imperial Message ( )

This collection of 41 pieces of Franz Kafka's shorter fiction includes English versions of the well-known classics as well as several more obscure works.

The four classics that are included are "The Metamorphosis", "The Hunger Artist", "The Judgment", and "In the Penal Colony". Other included works are "First Sorrow", 14 short pieces that made up his book "A Country Doctor", 18 short items that made up his first book, "Contemplation", and "The Stoker" (first chapter of the posthumous book "America"), plus 3 early stories ("Conversation with the Worshipper", "Conversation with the Drunk", and "Great Noise").

The works were translated into English by Joachim Neugroschel. Two book jacket blurbs praise Neugroschel's translations as being an advance over previous translations (clearly including the older Willa and Edwin Muir translations). An introduction by Neugroschel reflects on the confusion and complexities involved in the translation of Kafka's prose. He notes that Kafka's wrote in "Prague" German, a form that "lacks the slang, colloquialisms, and dialectal influences" of High German.

This collection is a useful survey of Kafka's short fiction, and in addition to the classic works, includes a number of others not found in the early volume edited by the Muirs. Among them are Kafka's early stories, plus his first published collection "Contemplation" (published in 1912 as "Betrachtung", a title often rendered in English as "Meditation"), as well as the short stories that make up the 1917 collection "A Country Doctor". However, this collection also lacks some other short stories that Kafka fans and scholars consider to be notable, such as "The Great Wall of China", "The Burrow", and "Josephine the Singer or the Mouse Folk".

For my part, I favor three classic works ("The Metamorphosis", "The Hunger Artist", and "The Judgment") while considering "In the Penal Colony" bizarre and disturbing. The remaining selections I find to be as enigmatic and perplexing, and have few attractions for me. My ratings for this collection reflect its coverage and the perceived quality of its translations more than my own reaction to the pieces themselves.

Readers interested in reading descriptive commentaries on each of the stories found in "A Country Doctor" and "Contemplations can find them at Wikipedia, via the links below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Country_Doctor_(short_story_collection)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemplation_(short_story_collection) ( )

A collection of Kafka's shorter fiction published in his lifetime with some travel writing as an appendix.

This is the first Kafka I've read. I can see why 'The Metamorphosis' is well known but I found the rest of the collection to be pretty much hit or miss, with some weird tales and others that just left going "so?". 'The Hunger Artist' was interesting, but actually my favourite was 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia', a piece of travel writing about a trip Kafka made in 1909 by train and car to see the air show at Brescia in 1909 - the whole idea of doing such a thing in 1909 seems so unexpected. ( )

I'm giving this book a certain score, but realize first and foremost that it is wildly inconsistent. There can be no doubt that "The Metamorphosis" and "In The Penal Colony" are masterpieces of short literature that rank with the highest of perhaps anything that's been written in the form. The works that come close to those are "The Judgment" and "A Hunger Artist" which perhaps most merit the score I give. They're very good achievements, but they don't have a good connection to the hand that wrote "The Trial", which is Kafka's unfinished masterpiece.

The rest of this collection is somewhat similar to Typee from Herman Melville. The elements of good writing are present but they haven't formed into that je ne sais quois that forms literature. These works can't even be called Kafka-esque in the same way Typee can't be considered Melvillean. Everyone will remember Melville for Moby Dick, a work that almost achieves the status of The Great American Novel, and similarly Kafka will be remembered for "The Trial" and the short stories for which this collection is partially named, but both authors must've not been able to feel their way out naturally since they both produce art that is wildly non-indicative.

It's not so much that these other stories are bad, but in a collection like this they are indeed "other." It's too bad that Kafka was not as prolific as Melville, since Melville managed to pump out a good bevy of excellent short stories between Moby Dick and his final hurrah of "Billy Budd, Sailor." This final stage of Melville's life carries almost as much of his legacy as Moby Dick itself. Kafka, on the other hand couldn't seem to decide what he wanted to produce in finality. Or else he could, but he still dotted it with less important work along the way.

I would suppose it were a blessing that Kafka couldn't decide on his ultimate vision the way Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft could. After all, his vision was a lot more complicated. It encased the full experience of the 20th century man, parts of which were left out for Poe or Lovecraft- Poe being nevertheless a literary auteur of the strange, frightening, and imaginative. Kafka, in his few masterworks, reached into the soul of man and reflected it back to us in all of its stunning sadism and otherwise. His beautiful portraits of transformation and auto-mechanism should be familiar to all. We can learn the ways we shouldn't treat each other in Kafka. ( )