Metamorphosis and other stories - Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories is translated from the German with an introduction by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics.

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes 'Metamorphosis', his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; 'Meditation', a collection of his earlier studies; 'The Judgement', written in a single night of frenzied creativity; 'The Stoker', the first chapter of a novel set in America; and a fascinating occasional piece, 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia', Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the imaginative depth of his thought.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-speaking insurance clerk who despised his job, preferring to spend his time writing. Nevertheless, Kafka published little during his lifetime, and ordered his closest friend to burn the mass of unpublished manuscripts, now familiar to us as some of the most influential novels and short stories of the twentieth century, after his death. Kafka's novels, all published posthumously, include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

If you enjoyed Metamorphosis and Other Stories, you might like Kafka's The Trial, also available in Penguin Modern Classics

'What Dante and Shakespeare were for the ages, Kafka is for ours ... His relevance is absolutely unbroken'
George Steiner

'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during the twentieth century'
Elias Canetti on 'Metamorphosis'