Amerika

The Missing Person (The Schocken Kafka Library).

From Franz Kafka, the visionary behind The Metamorphosis and The Trial, comes his first—and most unexpectedly humorous—novel.

Amerika follows young Karl Rossmann, exiled to America after a scandal, in hopes of redemption. Instead, he’s swept into a surreal journey of misfortune, absurd encounters, and darkly comic adventures in a land that promises everything—and delivers anything but.

Written between 1912 and 1914 under the title Der Verschollene (The Missing Person), the unfinished manuscript was posthumously edited and published in 1927 by Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod.