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A Franz Kafka scholar’s perceptive annotation and translation highlights every subtle shade of humour and brilliant aphorism in these singular tales

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

Picture the scene. It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever. A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time.

If someone had told me a few weeks ago that nearly every major news website and social media account in the English-speaking world would post a video of Margaret Atwood – the 82-year-old matron saint of Canadian letters, the subject of countless doctoral dissertations and at least ten forests worth…