Metamorphosis and Other Stories » (Special Value)

Franz Kafka was one of the most significant and influential fiction writers of the 20th century. Dark, absurdist, and existential, his stories and novels concern the struggles of troubled individuals to survive in an impersonal, bureaucratic world.

Kafka imagines what happens when a man wakes up to find that he has become a giant insect. Also included are stories by Guy De Maupassant: The Englishman, The Piece of String, The Necklace, A Crisis, The Will, Love, The Inn, and Was it a Dream.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Who among us, upon awaking from troubled dreams and dreading another soul-sucking day at the office, hasn't felt a bit like a cockroach? So it goes with Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka's nightmare allegory "Metamorphosis." In the 1915 tale of the dutiful son and exhausted traveling salesman who is unaccountably transformed into a giant insect, Kafka tapped into our fear that we're little more than vermin under the hard-soled shoes of society. We dread a life where we'll end up like Gregor, whose "whole left side was one long, unpleasantly stretched scab, and he was positively limping on his two rows of legs." Only a handful of Kafka's stories were published before his death in 1924; he left his friend Max Brod with instructions to destroy all remaining manuscripts. Fortunately, Brod disobeyed, and today not only has "Kafkaesque" entered the lexicon, but thousands of grad students have labored to dissect the symbolism in Kafka's unfinished novels: The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). "Kafka's writing is a remarkable instance of something coming out of nowhere and, in the space of a human generation, attaining in its reception the condition of inexhaustible intractability he was so often drawn to describing within it," Michael Hofmann writes in the introduction to his translation of Metamorphosis and Other Stories. To Hofmann, a typical Kafka story is "a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable." Take, for instance, "In the Penal Colony," where he describes how prisoners are strapped beneath a machine whose needles inscribe their crimes on their skin, over and over until nothing but bloody meat remains. Nearly every story in this collection is a classic example of what happens when realism and allegory press against each other and make us writhe in the nightmares of a writer at the peak of his art. --David Abrams

Biographical Preface
Introduction Note on the Text Note on the Translation Select Bibliography A Chronology of Franz Kafka

MEDITATION
Children on the Highway 3
Unmasking a Confidence-Man 5
The Sudden Stroll 7
Decisions 8
The Trip to the Mountains 8
The Bachelor's Distress 9
The Small Businessman 9
Gazing Out Idly 11
The Way Home 11
The Runners 12
The Passenger 12
Dresses 13
The Rebuff 13
For Gentleman-Riders to Think About 14
The Window on to the Street 14
Wish to Become a Red Indian 15
Trees 15
Unhappiness 15
THE JUDGEMENT THE METAMORPHOSIS IN THE PENAL COLONY LETTER TO HIS FATHER

Explanatory Notes
Meditation The Judgement The Metamorphosis In the Penal Colony Letter to his Father