Read The Castle

Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect and his family adjusts; Kafka in sixty pages.

Josef K. is arrested for something nobody will name; the word Kafkaesque comes from here.

An officer demonstrates the machine that writes a condemned man's sentence into his back over twelve hours.

Two girls named Marie decide to be as bad as the world; Vera Chytilova's anarchic collage.

A director with nothing to say makes a film about that; Fellini's masterpiece.

A thirty-year-old is dragged back to school; Gombrowicz's grotesque about immaturity.

Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.

A novel you can read in two orders; Cortazar's Paris and Buenos Aires.