Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in ‘Little Fable’ to the absurd humor of ‘Investigations of a Dog,’ from the elaborate waking nightmare of ‘Building the Great Wall of China’ to the creeping unease of ‘The Burrow,’ where a nameless creature’s labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.