Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Description

'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias Canetti 'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias Canetti WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRWELL One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is understandably perturbed and he finds himself an outsider in his own home. In 'Metamorphosis' and the other famous stories included here, Kafka explores the confusing nature of human experience with sly wit and compelling originality.

Franz Kafka (Author) Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker- A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis- America, The Trial and The Castle. Adam Thirlwell (Introducer) Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape and a novella, Kapow!. His work is translated into thirty languages. He has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Edwin Muir (Translator) Edwin Muir (1887 - 1959), one of our most distinguished modern poets, was, too, a traveller, translator, critic and novelist, the author of the famed Structure of the Novel and The Marionette. With his wife, Willa Muir, he was the translator of Kafka's The Castle and The Trial. He received the CBE in 1953, and settled in Cambridgeshire, where he continued to write poetry until his death in 1959.

He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him -- Vladimir Nabokov I think of a Kafka story as a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable -- Michael Hofmann