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Kafka's Complete Stories is the rare book to which I could give two stars or five. Beyond his writing, I love him for his humanity, his authenticity, and his painful incompatibility with the modern world. His attempts, however, to put all this in writing are unfortunately inconsistent, ranging from mesmerizing to incomplete "scribbling" as he referred to his own writing. As a reader I am repeatedly wishing beyond wishing that he had expanded, developed, and completed more of the stories and fragments that he left behind, even if he did not expect or desire them to be published. But then there are also stories like "A Little Woman," "A Country Doctor," the famous "Metamorphosis," and probably my favorite, "The Judgment," along with several others, which really begin to communicate Kafka's inner self in a moving way. Other readers will surely find other stories to be their favorites, a further testament to his work.

Bureaucracy. Offices. Forms. Social expectations. Domineering fathers. Managers. Jobs. A world of talk talk, cheap talk, dispirited organization(s), deceptive systems and their propagating individuals. So cheap and disgusting that it sets forth a frightening gloom and apocalyptic sense of loss. Kafka deeply felt one of the greatest tragedies of modernity: the loss of spirit to ingrained, mass-produced socialization serving mere manipulation, the victory of faceless egotism and vapid professionalism packaged in self-importance for the sake of materialism and pseudo-rationalism, normally at the expense of beauty and originality. Since his death, I'm sorry to report, nothing has improved. I still feel Kafka's dread, it is real, when I go into the doctor's office, Philadelphia restaurants, public schools. At his best, Kafka's writing offers safe harbor from the trembling, or at least a pillow of criticism to rest one's head while on this insufferable road Western society calls the 20th/21st century, a moment to recall our own humanity as it inevitably gets lost in this massive shuffle, Kafka's greatest fear.