The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These aphorisms appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka s death in 1924. While working on K. , his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zurau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka s opus a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content. The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.