There was a serious difficulty with the manuscript in that Kafka had kept the chapters in separate envelopes which were titled, but not with numbers, resulting in an ordering process which proved to be an enigma, this time hermetic. For this reason, the novel always appeared in ten chapters of the sixteen which make up the central bulk of the story. The remaining chapters appeared in an appendix, a decision which Max Brod, the editor, tried to justify by stating that the chapters were unfinished instead of speaking frankly and saying that he did not know what to do with them. As can be seen in the following editions, including the 1990 Critical German Edition, no one had the faintest idea where these chapters were to be placed. "With the manuscript in its current state," determined Reiner Stach, "the problem is unsolvable. We can only hope that one day a table of contents written by Kafka himself might be discovered in a forgotten attic in Prague. [...]."The situation was thus when the new kid on the block discovered that The Trial is a palimpsest of Crime and Punishment in that Kafka uses Dostoevsky's text to cryptically narrate his relations with Felice Bauer, particularly the relations of his marriage promise - the rupture of which being the principal theme of the novel. This signifies that The Trial has an onion-esque structure with three texts or superimposed layers: the first layer is the base text, Crime and Punishment, which serves as the backdrop; the second is the biographical element (real) of the story; the interweaving of these two (the actual work) is the third layer, the only layer visible for the eyes of the reader, and that which envelops the first two.[...]To write The Trial", Kafka disassembled all and each one of the parts of "Crime and punishment" and selected the blocks that he needed for his own construction, following this compositional principle: "The structure and the plot of The Trial follow the structure and plot of Crime and Punishment". This principle easily enables the assembling of the puzzle of the novel, and the ordering of the chapters that has been sought for so many years.
We now offer, in this edition, appearing for the first time:
1. A new distribution (17 chapters in the body of the text opposite the traditional 10 and six fragments.)
2. A new chapter titled "A Dream".
3. Many explanatory notes about the novel's creative process, the origin of its characters and of many of its scenes.
4. And the story of the solving of a genuine mystery which had baffled experts for almost a century.

All this make this edition the true premiere of The Trial in the eve of its centenary.