Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Mark M. Anderson is Professor of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of Kafka’s Clothes and the editor of Reading Kafka. He has written widely on literary modernism and has edited and translated contemporary Austrian writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. Susan Bernofsky has translated works by Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse, among others, and is the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize. She is the director of the literary translation program at Columbia University and lives in New York.

"Bernofsky’s vibrant new translation preserves the comedy as well as the tragedy of Kafka’s text; it convinces both on its own and when read with the original in mind."