May 1, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”
Let’s start this year’s series off with a classic, which also happens to be my favorite Kafka story (in close competition with “The Hunger Artist”). “In the Penal Colony” is, like so much of Kafka’s work, both an all-purpose metaphor and a specific, chilling portrait of cruelty, bureaucratic monstrosity, and human derangement. In it, a visitor to an unnamed land is “treated” to a demonstration of a certain machine—used to torture and execute anyone who has broken a rule by continually etching said rule into their skin—by its obsessive operator. But we slowly discover the true nature of the machine, and the operator, things begin to shift…
The story begins:
“It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveller, gazing with a certain admiration at the device, with which he was, of course, thoroughly familiar. It appeared that the Traveller had responded to the invitation of the Commandant only out of politeness, when he had been asked to attend the execution of a soldier condemned for disobeying and insulting his superior. Of course, interest in the execution was not very high even in the penal colony itself. At least, here in the small, deep, sandy valley, closed in on all sides by barren slopes, apart from the Officer and the Traveller there were present only the Condemned, a vacant-looking man with a broad mouth and dilapidated hair and face, and the Soldier, who held the heavy chain to which were connected the small chains which bound the Condemned Man by his feet and wrist bones, as well as by his neck, and which were also linked to each other by connecting chains. The Condemned Man, incidentally, had an expression of such dog-like resignation that it looked as if one could set him free to roam around the slopes and would only have to whistle at the start of the execution for him to return.
translation by Ian Johnston
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).