Franz Kafka—author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried, and Metamorphosis, in which a man becomes a giant insect—is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosophers. What has been so alluring about Kafka that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings?  This week we investigate with the help of Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor in German Language and Literature at Yale University and one of the world’s great Kafka scholars.