Extract

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

A man wakes on his thirtieth birthday to find himself under arrest, though no one will tell him the charge, and the novel follows his desperate attempts to engage a legal system operating by laws he cannot access. Franz Kafka wrote it in 1914, left it unfinished, and asked Max Brod to burn it; Brod published it in 1925, and the world received a prophecy it would spend the century living into. Josef K. is not innocent, exactly, nor guilty; the categories do not apply where courts convene in tenement attics and judges consult pornography. Kafka understood that modern power does not punish the condemned but processes them, endlessly, until the process itself becomes the punishment. The law was meant only for you, and you will never enter.