This trilingual edition brings together two of Kafka's most enigmatic stories.


In A Ghost, the narrator, who lives alone and is obviously a bachelor, is confronted with an unexpected visitor. The appearance of a ghost leads to a strange, disconcerting dialogue between the narrator and the ghost.


A Hunger Artist, the second story in this volume, is one of Franz Kafka's best-known tales alongside The Metamorphosis and The Penal Colony. The text focuses on the climax of starvation. Fasting was commercialised in the 19th century and stylised into a true spectacle, even moving the masses in the cities. The narrator describes the ‘astonishment’ felt by the audience at the sight of the emaciated limbs of the artist's body bedded on straw. But Kafka's starving artist does not suffer from the consequences of malnutrition. On the contrary, he reverses this deprivation and turns it into a show which, to his regret, comes to an end after 40 days. For the hunger artist, only self-sacrifice, death, is a possible way out of a life determined by struggle. He is the only one who has recognised the rules of the struggle for existence and, like so many of Kafka's main characters before him, has voluntarily drawn the consequences.