In this new selec­tion and trans­la­tion, Peter Worts­man mines Franz Kafka’s entire opus of short prose — includ­ing works pub­lished in the author’s brief life­time, posthu­mous­ly pub­lished sto­ries, jour­nals, and let­ters — for nar­ra­tives that sound the imag­i­na­tive depths of the great Ger­man-Jew­ish scribe from Prague. It is the first vol­ume in Eng­lish to con­sid­er his deeply strange, res­o­nant­ly humane let­ters and jour­nal entries along­side his clas­sic short fic­tion and lyri­cal vignettes ​“Trans­formed” is a vivid retrans­la­tion of one of Kafka’s sig­na­ture sto­ries, ​“Die Ver­wand­lung,” com­mon­ly ren­dered in Eng­lish as ​“The Meta­mor­pho­sis.” Com­posed of short, black com­ic para­bles, fables, fairy tales, and reflec­tions, Konun­drums also includes clas­sic sto­ries like ​“In the Penal Colony,” Kafka’s pre­scient fore­shad­ow­ing of the night­mare of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, refresh­ing the writer’s myth­ic sto­ry­telling pow­ers for a new gen­er­a­tion of readers.