
The Trial
Josef K. is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ruined by his own efforts to clear himself. Kafka made faceless authority funny, and gave the century its word for dread.

Josef K. is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ruined by his own efforts to clear himself. Kafka made faceless authority funny, and gave the century its word for dread.

Gregor Samsa wakes as an enormous insect and worries first about missing his train. The horror turns domestic fast, and his family decides the son who supported them is now a burden.

Malevich hung it high in the corner where a Russian house keeps its icons, and called it the zero of form.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard, an American begins, then tells it out of order, circling two couples whose friendship at a German spa hid adultery, debt, and ruin.

Three generations of one Nottinghamshire family, and Lawrence writes their marriages from inside the body: what draws two people together, what turns cold, and what the granddaughter Ursula cannot find.

Orphaned and clubfooted, Philip Carey tries Germany, Paris, painting, and medicine, then wrecks himself on a waitress who despises him. Nobody has written the humiliation of unreturned love more exactly.

Naked conscripts showering in a barracks under a mounted officer, painted after the army service that broke Kirchner down.
I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

Wanted for a murder in his own flat, Richard Hannay bolts across the Scottish moors with a dead spy's coded notebook. Hitchcock filmed it, and the innocent fugitive became the thriller's engine.