In the ever-growing body of literature on Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti's *The Other Trial* (1968) has long held a prominent place. This volume presents a new edition of this seminal essay, supplemented by a wealth of previously unpublished material: the contents of the "notebooks" in which Canetti made all sorts of annotations while writing it. These are reading notes (from the systematic reading that Canetti undertook at the time of Kafka's entire oeuvre), interwoven with many other notes in which the author of *Crowds and Power* projects his own obsessions onto Kafka and contrasts his own personality with Kafka's. In this way, we gain access to the laboratory of ideas, revelations, and experiences from which *The Other Trial* emerged, its text now illuminated in new light.

The preparatory work for The Other Trial took place during a period of great upheaval in both Canetti's personal life and literary career, and was concentrated in 1968, a year of enormous political and cultural ferment. All of this is reflected in the notes collected here, which are supplemented by those Canetti had dedicated to Kafka in the years prior to receiving the commission to write The Other Trial, as well as many others written after the essay's publication until his death in 1994.

This collection thus encompasses virtually everything Canetti wrote in relation to "the writer who has most purely expressed our century and whom I therefore consider its most essential manifestation."