The Trial.

KAFKA, Franz.

Item Number: 126091

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.

First edition of Kafka’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in the rare original dust jacket, which is in near fine condition. Jacket design by George Salter. An exceptional example.

Kafka's The Trial, according to Albert Camus, takes us "to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety." Published posthumously in German in 1925 by Kafka's friend and executor Max Brod, the book "has passed into far more than classical literary status… In more than one hundred languages, the epithet 'kafkaesque' attaches to the central images, to the constants of inhumanity and absurdity in our times… In this diffusion of the kafkaesque into so many recesses of our private and public existence, The Trial plays a commanding role" (George Steiner). In 1999, it was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as number two of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.