"The story of the mysterious indictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K. in Franz Kafka's The Trial is one of the twentieth century's master parables, reflecting the central spirital crises of modern life. Kafka's method--one that has influenced, in some way, almost every writer of substance who followed him--was to render the absurd and the terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperreal matter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby...