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Sign up todayThe Castle
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThis edition of Kafka's terrifying and comic masterpiece is the product of an international team of experts who used Kafka's original text and notes to render this story as close to the author's vision as possible. Kafka's final novel tells the haunting tale of a man's relentless struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the Castle.
The story of K—the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle and yet cannot go home—seems to depict, like a dream from the deepest recesses of consciousness, an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. A perpetual human condition lies at the heart of this labyrinthine world: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration. An unfinished novel that feels strangely complete, The Castle uses absurd fantasy to reveal a profound truth.
Though Kafka seemed to think this work a failure, it has been recognized by critics as one of the greatest novels of its century.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924), one of the major fiction writers of the twentieth century, was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. His unique body of writing, much of which is incomplete and was mainly published posthumously, is considered by some people to be among the most influential in Western literature, inspiring such writers as Albert Camus, Rex Warner, and Samuel Beckett.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) (1936–2014) was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles. His audiobook narrations were named “Audio Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly, and he won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery.
Reviews
“To read Kafka is always a surprising encounter. It shocks literary conventions and takes you with a jolt to the depths of the soul…The new translation by Harman restores Kafka to Kafka.”
“A major and long-awaited event in English-language publishing. [A] wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers…Mark Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka’s original manuscript.”
“Sparkles with comedy, with zest, and with a fresh visual power…This is not just a new, brilliantly insightful, sensitive, and stylish translation, it is a new Castle, and it is a pleasure to read.”
“A necessary acquisition for anyone interested in Kafka.”
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