Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate thiscollection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, allunpublished during Kafka's lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between acat and a mouse in "Little Fable" to the absurd humor of "Investigations of aDog, " from the elaborate waking nightmare of "Building the Great Wall of China"to the creeping unease of "The Burrow, " where a nameless creature'slabyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.