The two stories that we present today were conceived at the end of 1912, one of the most productive periods of Kafka's life, during which he also composed The Transformation. Its publisher Kurt Wolff proposed to publish them in a volume that should have been entitled "The children", since among the three stories there was, as he had confessed Kafka, "an obvious secret link." In The Sentence, Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, communicates to his elderly father who has just been promised, but the meeting transforms into a nightmare full of reproaches. The stoker-first chapter of the novel The Disappeared, published posthumously-deals with the vicissitudes of Karl Roßmann aboard the transatlantic that takes him to New York, where his parents have sent him, after a scandal, in search of fortune.