Metamorphosis and Other Stories

One morning, Gregor Samsa woke to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This is the sentence that changed world literature — and the story that followed is as disturbing, as funny, and as precise about the mechanics of family dysfunction and human alienation as anything ever written. Gregor has spent his life working to support his family. Now, in his new form, he is a problem to be managed.

This Penguin Modern Classics volume collects The Metamorphosis alongside the finest of Kafka’s other stories — ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘The Judgment’, ‘A Country Doctor’, and others — offering a complete picture of his extraordinary range. These are stories of extraordinary formal confidence: each one sets up an impossible premise and then pursues it with a logic of complete consistency, arriving at conclusions that feel both inevitable and impossible to have anticipated.

The definitive Kafka collection in English, with translations that capture both the spare clarity and the underlying dread of the original. Essential world literature. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.