The tale of K’s arrival in the village below the castle that seems to rule it is Kafka’s Magnum Opus. 

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home.

“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?” suddenly came into his head. “But how not so, when I’ve done everything as it should be done?”― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

A celebrated journalist in his lifetime, Ambrose Bierce’s began circulating his own sardonic, mischievous definitions of words in his various columns for San Francisco newspapers. 

Revealing the truths and realities about Irish society in the early 20th century, Joyce’s Dubliners challenged the prevailing image of Dublin at the time. A group portrait made up of 15 short stories about the inhabitants of Joyce’s native city, he offers a subtle critique of his own town, imbuing the text with an underlying tone of tragedy. Through his various characters he displays the complicated relationships, hardships and mundane details of everyday life and the desire for escape – a yearning that so closely mirrored his own experiences.

The Eternal Husband is a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky that was first published in 1870 in Zarya magazine.[1] The novel’s plot revolves around the complicated relationship between the nobleman Velchaninov and the widower Trusotsky, whose deceased wife was Velchaninov’s former lover.