Kafka’s work, including The Metamorphosis and The Trial, is synonymous with the 'Kafkaesque'—a sense of surreal, nightmarish bureaucracy and existential dread. Born in Prague, he wrote in German and requested that his unpublished works be destroyed after his death. His friend Max Brod ignored this wish, bringing Kafka’s genius to the world. His narratives remain foundational to modernist literature, capturing the alienation of the individual in an incomprehensible world.