The Complete Stories — Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's short fiction — particularly The Metamorphosis (a man wakes as a giant insect), The Trial (a man is arrested but never told his crime), and In the Penal Colony — invented the "Kafkaesque": a mode of depicting bureaucratic alienation, inexplicable guilt, and the individual's helplessness before institutional power so precise and recognisable that it became an adjective in every major European language. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything on his death; Brod refused.