The stories here collected under the title Five Women combine two different volumes. All together, these stories, each of which (as the reader will guess) has a woman at the apparent centre of its gaze, has the feel of a series study, or of a natural history, though one performed in a strange and not entirely rational laboratory, or field. The intensity in these stories derives in part from looking at humans under the very ordinary extremities of love and desire. Neither love, nor femininity, is the subject matter so much as it is the medium. Translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser

The Confusions of Young Torless is a taut, powerful depiction of teenage masculinity in this short novel set in an Austrian military academy. An unpopular boy is gradually bullied and humiliated by a coterie of better-off classmates until the almost unbearable conclusion. This was the work which made Musil's name and is his most popular work before his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.

'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' Vladimir Nabokov The story of K. and his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his relentless, unavailing struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the castle that seems to rule it. K.'s isolation and perplexity, his begging for the approval of elusive and anonymous powers, epitomises Kafka's vision of twentieth-century alienation and anxiety.