The Basic Kafka is a collection of Franz Kafka's short stories. Employing grotesque, macabre and morbid plots and settings, Kafka creates a world with absurd and fantastic elements melded together. His stories often satirize bureaucracy and justice in modern urban society, presenting dark themes of human alienation, oppression and repression, fear, family, horror and brutality. Famous stories include "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "The Judgment," and "In the Penal Colony."