Kafka's first novel is the picaresque comic tale of a young man who disgraces himself in a sexual fiasco and is sent away to Amerika by his embarrassed parents--a fantastical Amerika that existed only in Kafka's imagination.

Kafka's stories--bleak, painfully comic, enigmatic--are invariably about man's alienation from daily life, but he creates a rich variety of worlds, from the absurdity of the hunger artist in his cage, to Gregor Samsa's vividly imagined transformation into a cockroach, to the profoundly ironic view of capital punishment in "In the Penal Colony."

Kafka's exploration of the psychological terror inherent in everyday life is both allegorical and stunningly realistic. A bank employee named Joseph K. is accused of a crime he not only did not commit but doesn't even understand. He is released, but thereafter enslaved to a legal system that requires him to continue to go to court to defend his innocence in a case that is never explained, never resolved. Try though he may to take control of the situation, the hero's life, revealed in all its barrenness, disintegrates not only at the bank where he works but in his relationship with a young woman and with his landlady. Finally, in a last absurd twist, he is executed. Kafka expressed the wish that THE TRIAL never be published, but thanks to the intervention of his literary executor, Max Brod, it appeared posthumously. It is considered a classic of modernist literature, an early existential work that has had enormous influence on most serious 20th-century writers.

As the Soviet Union collapses around them, the characters in these stories scramble to make lives for themselves. A nuclear plant worker sells plutonium on the sly in one story; in another, the first man in space looks back on his life, destroyed by the state. A New York Times Notable Book in 1999.