To Hofmann, a typical Kafka story is "a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable." Take, for instance, "In the Penal Colony," where he describes how prisoners are strapped beneath a machine whose needles inscribe their crimes on their skin, over and over until nothing but bloody meat remains. Nearly every story in this collection is a classic example of what happens when realism and allegory press against each other and make us writhe in the nightmares of a writer at the peak of his art.