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  • Published: 21 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241372555
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.00

Metamorphosis

A Life in Pieces





A collection of Kafka's greatest stories, including his famous tale of alienation, now in Penguin Black Classics

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself 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, and 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 extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

  • Published: 21 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241372555
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.00

Other books in the series

About the author

Franz Kafka

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.

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Praise for Metamorphosis

What Dante and Shakespeare were for the ages, Kafka is for ours

George Steiner
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