Rating: 
Summary: Great intro to Kafka
Review: "The Complete Stories" has everything the beginning Kafka reader neads to get started. Of course this is required reading for the Kafka enthusiast.A well thought-out forward by John Updike prepares you for your journey into the amazing and complex mind of Kafka. The book is divided into two sections, one for the longer stories and one for the shorter stories (most of which only take up a page or two). The stories themselves are great. "The Metamorphisis" is included, in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself in the form of a rather large insect! "The Penal Colony", "The Judgment" and "A Country Doctor" are also included. There's certainly hasn't been an author since Kafka able to play upon the fears and emotions of the human mind, those thoughts playing in out head, when we realize that maybe some of this could happen to us. If you enjoy "The Complete Stories", be sure to pick up "Amerika", "The Castle" and "The Trial". These are Kafka's three novels and will complete your collection. All very much worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Great intro to Kafka
Review: "The Complete Stories" has everything the beginning Kafka reader neads to get started. Of course this is required reading for the Kafka enthusiast. A well thought-out forward by John Updike prepares you for your journey into the amazing and complex mind of Kafka. The book is divided into two sections, one for the longer stories and one for the shorter stories (most of which only take up a page or two). The stories themselves are great. "The Metamorphisis" is included, in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself in the form of a rather large insect! "The Penal Colony", "The Judgment" and "A Country Doctor" are also included. There's certainly hasn't been an author since Kafka able to play upon the fears and emotions of the human mind, those thoughts playing in out head, when we realize that maybe some of this could happen to us. If you enjoy "The Complete Stories", be sure to pick up "Amerika", "The Castle" and "The Trial". These are Kafka's three novels and will complete your collection. All very much worth it!
Rating:
Summary: A Master
Review:
Kafka wasn't just a great 20th Century writer, he was, and I'd be willing to bet, always will be one of the greatest writers of all time. 'The Metamorphosis' insured his place in literary history, but this book, featuring all of his prose work with the exception of the 3 unfinished novels and 'The Stoker' which was tacked onto the beginning of AMERIKA, is priceless. Sure, the Updike intro is kinda windy, but you don't buy a book for the introduction anyway. And who is Updike to introduce Kafka anyway? I mean, he's ok, but reallly, they should've gotten DeLillo or Russel Banks. Or Harlan Ellison for that matter.
This is a book that you will return to again and again, sometimes to re-read the whole thing, other times just a story or two, and, as i have often done, just a paragraph here and there.
Get the Collected Stories and open your eyes to what writing is, or, at least, should be, all about.
Rating:
Summary: The Cares of a Family Man.
Review:
Somewhere at the back of this book, tucked in among fragments and sketches like a charred bower in a bombed-out city, is Kafka's eeriest, most condensed masterpiece, five paragraphs long and entitled "The Cares of a Family Man." The family man in question is the troubled narrator, and his cares -- "worries" would have been a better translation -- circle obsessively around someone or something called Odradek. What exactly IS an Odradek, though? Is it an "it" or a "he"?
An inanimate object or a man? A dybbuk or a child?
No one can say, and that's why this little story is disturbing
on a totally inexpressible level that goes beyond
dreams in its naturally-unfolding irrationality. Some readers might find that it cuts even deeper than The Metamorphosis. The only problem is that there's no adequate translation for the German word "hinunterkollern," a word that also appears in The Metamorphosis to describe the awful clicking sound of Gregor Samsa's shell on the hard floor.
Odradek makes that sound too, when he comes down the stairs... let's hope you never hear it.
Rating:
Summary: Kafka likes to hide.
Review: Approaching a complex writer is rarely easy. Perhaps the most influential author of the 20th century is no exception. Most people struggle with the heavy novel 'The Trial', not to mention the extremely confusing, though mind-shaking 'The Castle'. A much better option is to start with the Short stories. Join Karl Rossmann below deck on his way to 'America' or hide out with Gregor Samsa in his room, following his 'Metamorphosis'. You may be stung by the Kafka-bug, and like millions of others be mesmerized into the dreamlike world of Kafka. Anxiety, anguish, and apocalypse await those who dare enter this utterly disturbing inferno. This may sound pretty bad. However, no other writer has given me a reading experience that is even remotely similar to Kafka. He is unique! A new universe yet to unfold within your own mind. Unless your liking of Kafka is executed 'In the penal colony'....like a dog.....
Rating:
Summary: On some misunderstanding
Review: Every Kafka book, if not really badly translated, deserves a 5-star rating. However, the foreword of this book is misleading and insufficient, in fact, any critic on Kafka without detailed analysis on Kafka's family and the society is misleading and insufficient. Kafka was an over-sensitive humanbeing. He was thin and weak, while his father was big and strong. He worshiped his father. Although he did not want to obey his father (he wanted a career in writing), he was not strong enough to fight him (he finally earned his law degree). He loved his family and sacrificed a lot to his family, but they were common mercenary, heartless people who never understood his pain, which resulted The Judgement (toward his father) and The Metamorphisis (toward his whole family). Kafka was not a German, nor did Prague ever belong to Germany. It seems that few people are aware that Kafka lived in the breaking and dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mess of multi-nationality and multi-language. Hitler or Stalin or foreign politics was not Kafka's concern, and his works bear little evidence upon the struggle between Germans and Jews, the problems came within his own country, which was experiencing the pain of breaking into independent nations and the transition from monarchy to modern capitalism. The government was desperately showing its fading power by turning itself into a killing machine. (In The Trial, Joseph K never knew what he had been charged for, he could not find anybody to assist him, and he was finally secretly executed without a trial). Kafka's job has no important impact on his writing, but it exposed him to enough loneliness and unfortune in the lower society, and corruption in the government, which certainly added no credit to the Empire. Kafka actually saw the government and his father as the same tyrant, without either, Kafka would not be Kafka. If there is anything Kafkaesque, it is Kafka's way to see the world. Kafka did not imagine anything, he just honestly describe the world in his view. That is why no one can imitate Kafka. Whatever bizzare to us is routine to him. He writes with such calmness that it makes one think: maybe there does exist someone turning into a roach everyday. Translation is not frictionless, no matter how well done it is. If you really love Kafka, and want a better understanding, start learning German today! (Unfortunately people cannot revise their reviews after they are posted, please forgive any immature thought).
Rating:
Summary: wondering
Review: I don't own this, but I was wondering if someone could list the stories included in this book. I've read and loved "The Metamorphosis and Other Stories," so I'm wondering if a majority of the stories in this are already included in the book I own. Or, since this is probably a far too strenuous task, if someone whom has read both could tell me if my thoughts are true or not, it'd be greatly appreciated. I know this isn't that great of a review for a book I haven't even read, but maybe there are more people wanting the same information.
Rating:
Summary: Good paper quality
Review: I order this one for my roommate, so I did
not read it in fact. What I can said is that
the book is printed in high quality paper. It
looks beautiful!
Rating:
Summary: description of a struggle; or, conformity to formlessness
Review: i've only read one of these buggers, which in my version is the first, DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE. in it, a man walking down the street with an 'acquaintance' of his is drawn into a surreal dreamworld, where his acquaintance turns into a donkey, the storyteller commands the landscape to change, and a fat man is carried into a river and swept away. no doubt all of this has to do very directly with the unconscious mind, but i don't know tuppence about that. what i do know is it's absolutely brilliantly written, and putting the book down is like waking up from a beautiful nightmare. i strongly suggest that anyone with a few screws loose who isn't afraid to lose a few more pick up this book; it may even inspire you to write your own stuff, as it did for me.
Rating:
Summary: The seperate permant place
Review: It would be foolish to offer too much praise. These stories demonstrate the internal collapse of a great mind; a mind great enough to observe its own maker. Yet for the reader who has been through such a sensation Kafka is supreme. He offers easy to read stories with almost unmatched complexities. I guess in many ways he represents what is buetiful about our deaths; a buety I must admit my daily life does not always allow me to appreciate and corraspond with. Never the less I must praise him in the end.
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