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On the night of 22 September 1912 Franz Kafka, a 29-year-old lawyer at a workers’ accident insurance institute in Prague, wrote “The Judgment” in a single sitting and called it “the total opening of body and soul”. He prepared only seven slim books of stories for print, among them The Metamorphosis (1915); the last appeared just after his death. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40, and left his friend Max Brod a note asking for everything else to be burned unread. Brod refused, and published The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927, followed by the diaries and letters. Almost everything readers now know as Kafka came out after his death. This guide covers his thirteen key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1912–1952 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Franz Kafka’s best-known books are The Metamorphosis (1915) and his three unfinished novels, The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927), all published after his death by Max Brod. Start with The Metamorphosis: it is short, complete, and shows his method in its clearest form. Then read The Trial, the book behind the word “Kafkaesque”.
Where to Start with Franz Kafka
If you want his most famous story
→ The Metamorphosis (1915) — short, finished and the clearest view of his method.
If you want the novel behind “Kafkaesque”
→ The Trial (1925) — a man arrested for a crime nobody will name.
If you want his shortest, strangest pieces
→ A Country Doctor (1919) — fourteen stories, including “Before the Law”.
If you want the man behind the fiction
→ Letter to His Father (1952) — the letter he wrote to his father and never sent.
13 Franz Kafka Books, in Order
Contemplation
Betrachtung, eighteen very short prose pieces written between 1904 and 1912, published by Rowohlt in an edition of 800 copies, printed at the end of 1912 and dated 1913. It opens with “Children on a Country Road” and includes “The Passenger” and “Unhappiness”. In English it is also called Meditation; all eighteen pieces are in The Complete Stories (1971).
The Judgment
Das Urteil, written in one sitting on 22 September 1912 and first printed in 1913 in Arkadia, a yearbook edited by Max Brod, with a dedication to Felice Bauer; it came out as a separate book in 1916. Georg Bendemann tells his ailing father about his engagement and a friend in Russia; the father turns on him and sentences him to death by drowning, and Georg runs to a bridge and jumps. Kafka counted it among his most successful work. In English it is in the Muirs’ collection The Penal Colony (1948) and in The Complete Stories.
The Metamorphosis
Die Verwandlung, written in late 1912, first printed in the October 1915 issue of Die weißen Blätter and as a book by Kurt Wolff in December 1915. Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and his sister Grete, wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family moves from horror to shame to resentment. Kafka told the illustrator Ottomar Starke that the insect itself must not be drawn, not even from a distance. The first English translation in book form, by A. L. Lloyd, appeared in London in 1937.
In the Penal Colony
In der Strafkolonie, written in October 1914, revised in 1918 and published by Kurt Wolff in October 1919. On an unnamed island an officer shows a visiting traveller a machine that executes prisoners by inscribing their sentence into their skin over twelve hours; the condemned man does not know his sentence. When the traveller will not back him, the officer puts himself in the machine, which breaks down and kills him. Eugene Jolas’s English translation appeared in Partisan Review in 1941.
A Country Doctor
Ein Landarzt, fourteen short pieces published by Kurt Wolff in 1919 and dedicated to his father, whose reported response was “Lay it on my nightstand.” It contains the title story, “Before the Law” (the parable also told in The Trial), “A Message from the Emperor”, “Jackals and Arabs” and “A Report to an Academy”, in which an ape addresses a learned society. The stories are all in The Complete Stories in English.
A Hunger Artist
Ein Hungerkünstler, four stories published by Verlag Die Schmiede a few months after his death: “First Sorrow”, “A Little Woman”, “A Hunger Artist” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”. The title story, first printed in Die neue Rundschau in 1922, follows a professional faster whose audience loses interest. Kafka corrected the proofs during his final illness, when he could barely eat. Willa and Edwin Muir’s English versions appeared in The Penal Colony (1948).
The Trial
Der Process, written in 1914–15 and published by Verlag Die Schmiede on 26 April 1925. Josef K., a bank official, is arrested on his thirtieth birthday by an unnamed authority for a crime nobody will state, and spends a year trying to deal with a court he cannot find; a priest tells him the parable “Before the Law”. Kafka left 161 loose pages in bundles, so the chapter order is Brod’s. Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation appeared in 1937; Orson Welles filmed it in 1962 with Anthony Perkins.
The Castle
Das Schloss, begun on 27 January 1922 in the mountain resort of Spindlermühle and published by Kurt Wolff in 1926. A man known only as K., who says he is a land surveyor, arrives in a village ruled by officials in a nearby castle and tries and fails to reach the official Klamm; the novel breaks off mid-sentence. Willa and Edwin Muir translated it in 1930; Mark Harman’s 1998 translation follows the restored German text. Michael Haneke filmed it in 1997.
Amerika
Written from 1911 to 1914 and published by Kurt Wolff in 1927 under Brod’s title; Kafka called it Der Verschollene (The Missing Person). Sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann is sent to New York after getting a housemaid pregnant, and drifts through hotels and lodgings towards the “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma”. Its first chapter had appeared alone as The Stoker in 1913. In English: Willa and Edwin Muir (1938), Michael Hofmann as The Man Who Disappeared, and Mark Harman as Amerika: The Missing Person (2008).
The Great Wall of China
Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, unpublished stories and prose pieces from the papers, edited by Max Brod and Hans-Joachim Schoeps and published by Gustav Kiepenheuer in 1931. Besides the title story it contains the 109 aphorisms Kafka wrote in Zürau in 1917–18. Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933.
Diaries
The notebooks Kafka kept from 1910 until 1923, a year before his death, mixing daily notes, dreams and drafts of stories. They appeared in English first, from Schocken in New York in two volumes in 1948 and 1949, translated by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg; Brod’s German edition, Tagebücher 1910–1923, followed from S. Fischer in 1951. Brod cut names, sexual passages and other material, which Ross Benjamin restored in his complete translation of 2023.
Letter to His Father
Brief an den Vater, written in November 1919: about 45 typed pages, corrected by hand, that begin with his father’s question why Kafka says he is afraid of him. Kafka gave it to his mother to pass on; according to Brod she never did. It was first printed in Die neue Rundschau in February 1952. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins translated it in Dearest Father (1954).
Letters to Milena
Kafka’s letters of 1920–23 to Milena Jesenská, a married Czech journalist and writer with whom he had an intense relationship from 1920. Willy Haas edited the first German edition in 1952 and cut passages that might hurt living people; they were restored in 1983. Tania and James Stern’s English translation appeared in 1953, Philip Boehm’s in 1990.
In What Order to Read Franz Kafka
Nothing in Kafka continues from one book to the next, and the publication order is partly an accident of Brod’s editing: the novels were written before or alongside the late stories, but came out after them. A practical order is the finished stories first (The Metamorphosis, “The Judgment”, “In the Penal Colony”), then The Trial, then The Castle.
Most English readers meet the short work through The Complete Stories (1971), edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, which gathers the stories from all the books on this page. Leave the diaries and Letter to His Father until you know the fiction, so you can see where it came from.
A reading path
1. The Metamorphosis (1915)
2. The Judgment (1913)
3. The Trial (1925)
4. A Country Doctor (1919)
5. The Castle (1926)
6. Letter to His Father (1952)
Everything Else Franz Kafka Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Stories and aphorisms
3
3 books · 1913–1971
- 1913The Stokerthe first chapter of Amerika, published on its own by Kurt Wolff
- 1931The Zürau Aphorisms109 aphorisms from 1917–18, first printed in The Great Wall of China; a separate English edition in 2006
- 1971The Complete Storiesthe standard English one-volume collection, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer
Letters
1
1 book · 1967
- 1967Letters to Felicehis letters of 1912–1917 to Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged twice
The years · 1883–1924
Quick facts about Franz Kafka
- Known for
- Stories and unfinished novels in which ordinary people are trapped by authorities, families or transformations that are never explained, written in a calm, exact prose that gave the language the word “Kafkaesque”.
- 1883
- Born in Prague
- 1906
- Doctor of Law, Prague
- 1912
- Writes “The Judgment” in one night
- 1924
- Dies near Vienna, aged 40
- Born
- 3 July 1883, Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary
- Education
- Doctor of Law, German Charles-Ferdinand University, Prague, 1906
- Worked
- Assicurazioni Generali (1907–08), then the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia until illness forced him to retire
- Never married
- Engaged twice to Felice Bauer and once to Julie Wohryzek; lived with Dora Diamant in Berlin in 1923–24
- Executor
- Max Brod (1884–1968), who refused to burn his papers
- Died
- 3 June 1924, at a sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna, of laryngeal tuberculosis; buried in the New Jewish Cemetery, Prague
The red mark is 1915: The Metamorphosis, his best-known work and one of the few he saw in print.
How Franz Kafka Writes: The Impossible, Stated Plainly
Kafka’s stories often put the impossible in the first sentence and then never question it. Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect; Josef K. is arrested without having done anything wrong. The prose that follows is calm, exact and almost official in tone, and the characters respond with practical worries rather than disbelief. The effect comes from that mismatch, not from description: Kafka asked that the insect on the cover of The Metamorphosis not be drawn at all.
Authority is his constant subject, and it often starts at home. In “The Judgment” a father sentences his son to death; A Country Doctor is dedicated to his father; Letter to His Father sets out, over 45 pages, why he was afraid of him. In the novels the authority grows into courts and castles whose officials cannot be reached. Kafka spent his working life at an insurance institute, and the language of offices, procedures and petitions runs through the fiction.
He wrote in bursts, often at night after work, and finished little. All three novels break off, so the books we read are partly Max Brod’s work: the chapter order of The Trial, the title Amerika, the cuts in the diaries. Translations based on the restored German texts, such as Mark Harman’s The Castle (1998), are closer to what Kafka left. For writers who share his strangeness, see Authors like Franz Kafka.
Frequently asked questions about Franz Kafka’s books
How many books has Franz Kafka written?
He prepared seven slim books of stories for print, from Contemplation (1912) to A Hunger Artist (1924), which appeared just after his death. Everything else — the three novels, the posthumous stories, the diaries and the letters — was published by Max Brod and others after 1924. This page covers thirteen key books, from Contemplation (1912) to Letters to Milena (1952).
What are Franz Kafka’s books in order?
Contemplation (1912), The Judgment (1913), The Metamorphosis (1915), In the Penal Colony (1919), A Country Doctor (1919), A Hunger Artist (1924), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), Amerika (1927), The Great Wall of China (1931), the Diaries (1951), Letter to His Father (1952) and Letters to Milena (1952). Years are those of the first German publication.
Where should I start with Franz Kafka?
The Metamorphosis. It is short, self-contained and finished, and it shows his method — an impossible event treated with complete calm — more clearly than his longer, unfinished novels. Read The Trial next.
What is Franz Kafka’s most famous book?
The Metamorphosis (1915), the story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect. Of the novels, The Trial (1925) is the best known.
Why didn’t Max Brod burn Kafka’s manuscripts?
Kafka left Brod notes asking that everything he left behind be “burned unread”. Brod said he had already told Kafka he would not do it, and that if Kafka had really wanted it done he should have chosen another executor. He published The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927), then the stories, diaries and letters, and in March 1939 took most of the papers with him to Palestine. Some material was lost anyway: according to Brod, Kafka had Dora Diamant burn notebooks in his last year.
Where are Kafka’s manuscripts now?
Largely in the National Library of Israel, after a long legal fight, though not all of them. Brod left his papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who sold some — the manuscript of The Trial is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach — and kept the rest for her daughters, who planned to sell them. In 2016 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the papers belonged to the National Library, and the last items, from bank vaults in Zurich, arrived in July 2019. Another large part had gone to England in the 1960s, after Kafka’s family heirs claimed it from Brod. Brod’s editing is debated too: the complete English diaries of 2023 restored passages he had cut.
What does ‘Kafkaesque’ mean?
The term describes situations marked by nightmarish, illogical bureaucratic complexity, in which an individual is trapped by an inaccessible authority or system with no clear rules, explanation, or means of appeal — directly drawn from the structure of The Trial and The Castle.
Did Kafka finish his novels?
No. The Trial, The Castle and Amerika were all left unfinished; The Castle stops mid-sentence. Brod chose the chapter order of The Trial and the title Amerika; Kafka called that book Der Verschollene (The Missing Person).
Which translation of Kafka should I read?
Willa and Edwin Muir made the first English versions of the novels (1930–1938) from Brod’s editions, and they are still widely read. Newer translations, such as Mark Harman’s The Castle (1998) and Michael Hofmann’s The Man Who Disappeared, follow the restored German texts. For the diaries, Ross Benjamin’s 2023 translation is the first complete one.
How did Franz Kafka die?
Of tuberculosis of the larynx, on 3 June 1924, at a sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna, a month before his 41st birthday. The illness made swallowing so painful that he could hardly eat. He is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
Footnotes
- Franz Kafka — Wikipedia
- Franz Kafka bibliography — Wikipedia
- Max Brod — Wikipedia
- The Fate of Franz Kafka’s Archive — National Library of Israel
- Brief an den Vater — franzkafka.de
- Long-standing legal dispute over Kafka manuscripts ends — Electric Literature, 2016
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904
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