Reading Order
The Trial Reading Order
Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925) is a complete standalone novel, published posthumously. It follows Josef K., a bank officer who is arrested one morning by two agents from an unspecified authority, without being told what crime he has committed, and who spends the following year trying to navigate a legal system that has no visible logic, produces no hearings, and offers no clear charges. Kafka left the novel unfinished; his friend Max Brod published it after his death in 1924.
Where to start
The Trial
Complete The Trial Book List
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The Trial
Franz Kafka·1925·Standalone — Josef K. arrested without explanation, navigating an incomprehensible legal system; Kafka's most accessible and widely read novel; the foundational text of existentialist literature; read the Mark Harman or Breon Mitchell translation for the most faithful rendering - Buy
The Castle
OptionalFranz Kafka·1926·Kafka's other major novel — K., a land surveyor, trying to gain access to the authorities of a castle that controls the village where he has arrived; similar in situation to The Trial but more openly symbolic and less conventionally plotted; published posthumously, also unfinished - Buy
The Metamorphosis
OptionalFranz Kafka·1915·Kafka's most famous work — Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect; a novella that can be read in a single sitting; the best introduction to Kafka's imagination for readers who haven't encountered him, though The Trial is more fully realized as a novel
The Trial — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Trial a standalone?
Yes — The Trial is entirely self-contained. Kafka's other major works — The Castle (1926) and The Metamorphosis (1915) — are independent and are not connected in plot or character to The Trial.
Why was The Trial published posthumously?
Franz Kafka was a perfectionist who destroyed most of what he wrote and left instructions that his remaining manuscripts should be burned after his death. His closest friend, the writer Max Brod, decided instead to publish them. The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were all published by Brod after Kafka's death from tuberculosis in 1924, at the age of forty. Kafka had considered The Trial unfinished; Brod assembled the chapters from the manuscript, in an order that is not definitively established as Kafka's intention.
What does The Trial mean? What is it about?
The Trial is about Josef K.'s arrest, trial, and execution by an unnamed authority for an unnamed crime — but it is not a realistic legal thriller. Critics have read it as an allegory of modern bureaucracy, of totalitarianism (though Kafka wrote it in 1914, before the major totalitarian states existed), of the relationship between the individual and divine judgment, of the Jewish experience in central Europe, and of Kafka's own psychological situation. Kafka himself did not provide an interpretation. The most enduring readings find it to be about the experience of being subject to a system so large and so opaque that one can never understand its logic or escape its grip.
Which translation of The Trial should I read?
The two most widely recommended translations are the Penguin Classics edition by Mike Mitchell (2009) and the Schocken Books edition by Breon Mitchell (1998). Both are much more faithful to Kafka's German than the older Willa and Edwin Muir translation (1937), which smooths out Kafka's deliberate oddities of syntax. The Muir translation is the one that made Kafka famous in the English-speaking world and has considerable historical interest, but the Mitchell and Mitchell translations are now preferred by scholars and careful readers.
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