Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka

"As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous vermin" With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing - though absurdly comic - meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. Only a small portion of Kafka's writings were published during his lifetime. He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored. "The greatest short story in all literary fiction." - The Guardian "I imagine Kafka laughing uproariously when reading the story to his friends." - Susan Bernofsky, The New Yorker "[T]here is nothing which Metamorphosis could be surpassed by." - Elias Canetti "The greatest German writer of our time." - Vladimir Nabokov