The Transformation and Other Stories

One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century – Elias Canetti on The Transformation

A companion volume to The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, these new translations bring together the small number of Kafka’s stories that he thought worthy of publication.

This volume contains his most famous story. The Transformation, more popularly known as Metamorphosis. Other works include 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 Fasting Artist, a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka’s life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

Front cover drawing by Franz Kafka