"Franz Kafka has become emblematic of the horrors of our century; the word "Kafkaesque" has entered the language in a way that "Proustian" and "Joycean" have not. In popularity and adaptability, The Trial beats all its rivals among the classic exposés of totalitarianism — Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs, Levi's The Periodic Table and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."