Book excerpt: Spanning the Brothers Grimm to Kafka and beyond, a new collection of the most strange and fantastical German stories from the past 200 years Franz Kafka posthumously cornered the nightmare market in the twentieth century. Yet in our adulation of Kafka's wonderfully bizarre prose, English-language readers tend to overlook the fact that he was not spawned Athena-like from the cranium of German literature. Kafka had his precursors among the German Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins and his heirs in post–World War II Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This rich and varied anthology gathers together many haunting stories, from the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, to Kafka's own chilling satire "In the Penal Colony," to the surreal fantasies of Kurt Schwitter in "The Onion." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.