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.

Franz Kafka's profile page

IAN JOHNSTON is the author of Changes in the Island Landscape, a study of his native Prince Edward Island.

Ian Johnston's profile page

Joseph L. Black is professor and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Joseph Black's profile page

Leonard Conolly's profile page

Kate Flint's profile page

Isobel Grundy's profile page

Don LePan, founder and CEO of academic publishing house Broadview Press, is the author of several non-fiction books and of two other works of fiction; his novel Animals (2010) has been described by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee as “a powerful piece of writing and a disturbing call to conscience.”

 

Don LePan's profile page

Roy Liuzza's profile page

Jerome J. McGann's profile page

Anne Lake Prescott's profile page

Barry V. Qualls' profile page

Claire Waters' profile page

“Simply remarkable! The translator … has done a superb job of making the uncannily ‘untranslatable’ Kafka accessible (especially in ‘The Metamorphosis’) in a manner that is fresh, vivid, and faithful as possible to the author’s original style.” — Gregory Maertz, St. John’s University

“In a fine balancing act, Ian Johnston’s translation blows the dust off of some of Kafka’s major short stories: its formality is never stiff and its colloquialisms never wooden. Johnston transports into modern English the unnatural syntactic and lexical clarity through which Kafka expresses such unnerving ambiguity. A compact yet wide-ranging introduction by Paul Johnson Byrne and the addition of excerpts from Kafka’s literary influences, as well as from his letters, make clear that Kafka was not some brilliant, inexplicable aberration, but rather a product of his background, experience, and reading: a ‘normal,’ yet still exceptional, author. This is a fine brief introduction to Kafka and his work.” — Paul Malone, University of Waterloo

“Equally attractive [as Ian Johnston’s translation] is the historical-philosophical background material on Kafka ‘In Context,’ which includes not only Sacher-Masoch, Nietzsche, Freud, and Mirbeau, but also lesser-known texts and cartoons from popular culture on the Hagenbeck Zoo and hunger artists. These texts are carefully selected to enhance our understanding of Kafka’s writings, and they make this innovative edition a valuable tool for teaching.” — Iris Bruce, McMaster University