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- Reading time of the complete text: about 8 hours

- Reading time of the summarized text: 7 minutes

"The Trial" is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. The story is about Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Kafka was heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The original manuscript consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, which Kafka had bundled together into chapters. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend Max Brod edited the work and assembled it into a novel to the best of his ability. The book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. The novel has been adapted into plays, operas, and films.