'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.

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

About the 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. 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. Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

Reviews
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



Book Information
ISBN 9780749399535
Author Franz Kafka
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Vintage Classics
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 170g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 15mm