The Castle

A darkly comic novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, The Castle follows a man grappling with his inscrutable new master’s authority, now freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Classics Line. Published posthumously in 1926, The Castle is Franz Kafka’s final, unfinished novel, and a dark, surrealistic exploration of bureaucracy and alienation. Known for its absurdity and labyrinthine plot, the novel follows a land surveyor known as “K” who, after moving for work, is drawn to a mysterious yet inaccessible castle that governs his new village. Irving Howe praised the book as projecting “a greater strength of will than we have encountered in Kafka’s earlier writings—an effort to overcome the muteness of existence.”