Read In the Penal Colony

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.

K. tries to reach the authorities in a snowbound village and never does; unfinished, mid-sentence.

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

The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.

A point that contains every other point, in a Buenos Aires cellar; Borges' second collection.

A universe of hexagonal galleries holding every possible 410-page book, nearly all of them gibberish.

Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.