The Trial

''The Trial'' (), and . Kafka used the spelling ''Process''; Max Brod, and later other publishers, changed it. See [http://www.textkritik.de/fka/dokumente/process.htm Faksimile Edition].}} is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's ''Crime and Punishment'' and ''The Brothers Karamazov'', Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, ''The Castle'' and ''Amerika'', ''The Trial'' was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.

After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in ''Le Monde'' 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. Provided by Wikipedia