Wedding Preparations in the Country (German: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande) is an incomplete work by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 which depicts in great detail the journey of the groom, Raban, travelling to the country to meet his future wife, Betty. Written between 1907 and 1908, three fragments with missing pages have survived, and, as with most of Kafka's work, they were published after his death by his friend Max Brod

Max Brod

Max Brod was a German-speaking Czech Jewish, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is most famous as the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka...

. According to Brod, Kafka's intention was to complete the story as a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

. An English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 translation of the story appears in The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all Kafka's short stories. With the exception of Kafka's three novels , this collection includes all of Kafka's narrative work. The book was originally edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and published by Schocken Books in 1971...

.