For several years the editors of the Modern Library have sought to include a representative yet variegated collection of Franz Kafka’s short stories in the series. Now, after long negotiations, fifteen of his best tales, selected and brilliantly introduced by Philip Rahv, editor of The Partisan Review, are made available to the ever-expanding circle of Kafka enthusiasts. The newly recognized master of obsessive fantasy, of symbolic narrative, stark and compelling in its reality, is represented in this volume by such memorable stories as “The Metamorphosis,” “The Great Wall of China,” “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony, “The Hunter Gracchus,“ ”The Burrow,” and nine others of equal power and inexorable fascination.