Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in Little Fable to the absurd humor of Investigations of a Dog, from the elaborate waking nightmare of Building the Great Wall of China to the creeping unease of The Burrow, where a nameless creature’s labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.