Name: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9781435165052

Franz Kafka

Writing in the first three decades of the 20th century, Franz Kafka explored the themes of alienation, anxiety and solitude in works that were are often surreally fantastic. This book collects more than 30 of Kafka's best-known tales in a new translation.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of capital punishment engraves the letter of the law into the body of the condemned. Such are the nightmare scenarios that emerge in the short stories of Franz Kafka, one of the twentieth century’s most formative, mystifying literary figures. Though immediate in their impact, Kafka’s stories invite endless angles of interpretation, from Freudian psychology and existentialist philosophy to animal studies. This volume presents “The Metamorphosis”—together with several other of Kafka’s best and best-known stories—in a nuanced, clear, and powerful translation by Ian Johnston. The appendices provide philosophical, literary, and cultural context, as well as valuable selections from Kafka’s own letters and drawings.

Would give it 5 stars but I don’t feel like all the stories are as compelling as Metamorphosis, but something I do give props to is the similarities in themes and darkness when portraying humans and their selfish tendencies in each story. 

With this being my second time reading Metamorphosis, it has become close to my heart as I too feel the same alienation and “uselessness” as Gregor at this point of my life. 

Mariana Espinosa

Would give it 5 stars but I don’t feel like all the stories are as compelling as Metamorphosis, but something I do give props to is the similarities in themes and darkness when portraying humans and their selfish tendencies in each story. 

With this being my second time reading Metamorphosis, it has become close to my heart as I too feel the same alienation and “uselessness” as Gregor at this point of my life. 



Nicole Neuman

Excellent new English translations of title story (considered by many critics Kafka's most perfect work), plus "The Judgment," "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor," and "A Report to an Academy." Note.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

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