Books like The Trial
A man is arrested, tried, and condemned by a court whose charges are never explained, in a parable about bureaucracy, guilt, and the absurdity of power.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Trial
The Castle
A land surveyor arrives at a village to work at the castle above it, but the castle's bureaucracy ensures he can never reach the people who summoned him.
The Metamorphosis
A man wakes up as a giant insect and his family's initial horror gives way to resentment, neglect, and the everyday cruelty of people who stop seeing you as human.
The Woman in the Dunes
A man trapped by a sandstorm in a coastal village is forced to live with a woman at the bottom of a sand pit, shoveling endlessly to keep them both alive.
The Pigeon
Jonathan Noel, a Parisian bank guard who has lived by strict routine for decades, finds a pigeon in the corridor outside his room, and his ordered existence begins to collapse.
The Double
A man discovers his exact double in a rented film, and the encounter destabilises his identity, his marriage, and his grip on what's real.
Steppenwolf
A middle-aged intellectual in Weimar Germany is torn between bourgeois respectability and the wildness inside him, guided by a mysterious figure through the theatres of his psyche.
All the Names
A clerk in a municipal registry office becomes obsessed with finding the person behind a name, and the search leads him out of bureaucracy and into the world.
The Tartar Steppe
A young Italian officer is posted to a remote fortress on the edge of a desert where the enemy has been expected for a century, and he learns how to wait.
Journey to the East
H. H., a musician, recalls his part in a secret League's pilgrimage to the East, a journey across time and imagination that fell apart when the humble servant Leo vanished.
No Exit and Three Other Plays
Four plays, among them No Exit, in which three dead strangers are shown into a windowless drawing room in hell, and Dirty Hands, about a young communist ordered to kill a party leader.
Cosmos
Two young men renting rooms in a Polish country house find a hanged sparrow in the woods and become obsessed with a web of signs that may or may not mean anything.
The Time Regulation Institute
Hayri İrdal, a man of no particular ability, tells how he came to help run an institute devoted to setting all the clocks of Istanbul to the same time.