Spanning the Brothers Grimm to Kafka and beyond, a new collection of the
most strange and fantastical German stories from the past 200 years Franz
Kafka posthumously cornered the nightmare market in the twentieth century.
Yet in our adulation of Kafka's wonderfully bizarre prose, English-language
readers tend to overlook the fact that he was not spawned Athena-like from
the cranium of German literature. Kafka had his precursors among the German
Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins and his
heirs in post-World War II Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This rich and
varied anthology gathers together many haunting stories, from the dark
fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, to Kafka's own chilling satire In the
Penal Colony, to the surreal fantasies of Kurt Schwitter in The Onion.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of
classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500
titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works
throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the
series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes
by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date
translations by award-winning translators.