Author Guide ·
Books Written by
Kafka wrote quiet, bureaucratic nightmares — ordinary men crushed by systems (legal, familial, metaphysical) that never explain themselves and can never be appealed to directly. He published almost nothing during his lifetime and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts after his death; Brod ignored him, and what survived became some of the most influential fiction of the 20th century.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Existentialist Fiction · Updated August 2026
Novella · Existentialist FictionOn my shelf
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a giant insect, and the novella follows his family’s shift from horror to shame to resentment as they gradually stop treating him as human at all. One of the most famous opening sentences in modern fiction.
The transformation itself is never explained and never questioned by the characters as impossible — Kafka’s method is to treat the surreal with total bureaucratic matter-of-factness, which is exactly what makes it unsettling.
Novel · Existentialist Fiction
The Trial
Josef K. is arrested one morning for a crime that is never specified, by an authority that never identifies itself, and spends the rest of the novel navigating a legal system with no discernible logic, appeal process, or endpoint. Published posthumously.
Written between 1914 and 1915 but left unfinished at Kafka’s death; the novel’s structure, arbitrary and inescapable, has become the direct reference point for the term ‘Kafkaesque.’
Novel · Existentialist Fiction
The Castle
A land surveyor arrives in a village governed by a remote, inaccessible castle bureaucracy and spends the unfinished novel trying and failing to make contact with the authority that supposedly summoned him. Left incomplete at Kafka’s death.
The most explicitly bureaucratic of his novels — the castle itself functions purely as an unreachable, unaccountable authority, never once directly encountered.
Novel · Unfinished
Amerika
Kafka’s least characteristic and most conventionally plotted novel, following a teenage German immigrant navigating a surreal, exaggerated version of America. Left unfinished and published posthumously under a title Kafka himself never used.
Notably more comic and picaresque than his other novels — useful for seeing a different register of Kafka’s imagination before it settled into the bureaucratic dread of The Trial and The Castle.
Short Story Collection
A Hunger Artist
A collection including the title story, about a professional faster who starves himself for public exhibition and is increasingly ignored by an audience that has lost interest, dying unmourned and unnoticed.
One of the last pieces Kafka approved for publication before his death, and often read as a direct allegory for his own relationship to an indifferent literary public.
