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  • Published: 8 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529903157
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrators: Tom Basden, Tim Key
  • RRP: $32.99

Franz Kafka: The Trial, Metamorphosis, Amerika & more

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama collection



Kafka’s finest works adapted for BBC radio – plus a biographical play, three discussion pieces and the award-winning Kafka The Musical

Kafka’s finest works adapted for BBC radio – plus a biographical play, three discussion pieces and the award-winning Kafka The Musical

A lawyer by day, Franz Kafka spent his nights writing visionary stories and novels exploring bureaucracy, power and alienation – iconic fiction that gave the world the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’.

This BBC anthology showcases his most famous works. Metamorphosis tells the tale of Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Starring Tom Basden, this Radio 4 production gives Kafka’s classic a modern twist with a darkly comic edge. In The Trial, a protagonist known only as ‘K’ is plunged into a nightmare world when he is accused of an unknown crime. Iwan Rheon leads an all-star cast including Phil Davis and Mark Heap.

Set in 1911, Kafka’s debut novel The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika) features a young man from Prague, sent away to the New World after an indiscretion with a girl. Read by Carl Prekopp, Tiny Tales offers an exquisite study in restlessness, while Dermot Crowley narrates the short story ‘A Country Doctor’.

Also included is Franz and Felice, a biographical play, and the Kafkaesque drama Kafka: The Musical, in which the author finds he has been cast to play himself in a show about his own life. David Tennant stars in this award-winning Radio 3 production. Three fascinating documentary programmes round off our collection, with discussions pieces on the man and the work.

First published 1915 (Metamorphosis), 1916 (‘A Country Doctor’), 1925 (The Trial), 1927 (Amerika)


© 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

  • Published: 8 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529903157
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrators: Tom Basden, Tim Key
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

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