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Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka; Translated by Will Aaltonen Pearson; Introduction by Will Aaltonen Pearson
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R280
R228
Discovery Miles 2 280
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Only yesterday, Gregor Samsa was a meek salesman, browbeaten by his
unappreciative employer and depended on fiercely by his ungrateful
family. This morning, Gregor awakens to discover that, overnight,
he has been transformed into a monstrous insect. As Gregor
frantically tries to conceal his predicament, neither his family
nor his unsympathetic employer accept that a terrible metamorphosis
has upended his existence. Is Gregor’s condition only temporary?
Will he eventually revert back to the person he was and resume his
normal life? Or might he have to accept that his transformation is
only an outward expression of how he—and those in his
life—actually see him? First published in 1915, Kafka’s
best-known tale has inspired numerous interpretations for more than
a century and helped to establish the term “Kafkaesque” as a
reference to a bizarre and nightmarish experience. This collection
of his short fiction, in a new translation, includes more than 30
of his short stories and sketches, including “In the Penal
Colony,” “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” “A Country
Doctor,” “A Hunger Artist,” and more.
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of
nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just
what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from
even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it
will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing
tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of
disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last
resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a
quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject?
The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant
culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's
struggle between his sense of independence and his need for
approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist,
victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally,
in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with
the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and
no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional
uncertainties and anxieties.
The story itself, Kafka's most famous, hardly needs describing -
a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find
he has been transformed into an enormous bug - but Faber Finds is
offering something rare, the very first English translation which
has been out of print for over sixty years.
This pioneering translation by A. L. Lloyd was first published
in 1937. A. L. Lloyd was multi-talented: ethnomusicologist,
journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and translator. In
this his centenary year (2008) Faber Finds is celebrating him in
his first and last roles. His major work, Folk Song in England, is
being reissued as are his Lorca and Kafka translations. As well as
both being published in 1937 both were firsts; has anyone else had
Spanish and German translations published in the same year?
It should also be mentioned that A. L. Lloyd was a lifelong
communist. It is a delicious irony therefore that one of the first
reviews of the Kafka was by Evelyn Waugh in the short-lived "Night"
"and Day"; it was a good one too.
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Metamorphosis (Paperback)
Franz Kafka
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R214
R164
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Superb collection by modern master explores the complexity, anxiety and futility of modern life. Excellent new English translations of the 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.
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Metamorphosis (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka, Michael Hoffman
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R240
R192
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Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions
of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest
writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take
us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England
to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on
the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and
printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile
cloth and stamped with foil. One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor
Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach.
Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is
one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction,
and is accompanied here by two more classic stories. 'He is the
greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such
novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison
to him' - Vladimir Nabokov
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Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka; Translated by Will Aaltonen Pearson; Introduction by Will Aaltonen Pearson
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R349
R282
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The Trial has been adapted for theatre, radio and cinema, including
a major stage adaptation at the Young Vic in London 2015.
Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an
intimate window into the desires and hopes of the
twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer Kafka first
made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was
translating his early short prose into Czech, and their
relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his
feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so,
laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's
'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted
him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In
1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in
1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving
record of their relationship.
Franz Kafka s 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish
transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century
later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It
is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one
morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This
hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge
Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle
millions of readers. In her new translation of Kafka s masterpiece,
Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity
in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa s
grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his
longstanding spiritual impoverishment."
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The Trial (Paperback)
Franz Kafka; Translated by Idris Parry; Introduction by Idris Parry
1
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R247
R201
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A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an
ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a
crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to
him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a
regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever
resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life
- including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and
a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly
unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in
accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
A collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by
Michael Hofmann Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour,
Metamorphosis, the story of an ordinary man transformed into an
insect, is brought together in this collection with the rest of his
works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes
Contemplation, a collection of his earlier short studies; The
Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The
Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and an
eyewitness account of an air display. Together, these stories,
fragments and miniature gems reveal the breadth of his vision, his
sense of the absurd, and above all his acute, uncanny wit.
Translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann
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The Lost Writings (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka; Edited by 'Reiner Stach; Translated by Michael Hofmann
bundle available
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R491
R403
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Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner
Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the
seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for
decades and two of them have never been translated into English
before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page;
a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most
fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two
large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene
Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). "Franz Kafka is
the master of the literary fragment," as Stach comments in his
afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of
completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall
mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off
beginnings." In fact, as Hofmann recently added: "'Finished' seems
to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition,
anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished,
the more finished. Gregor Samsa's sister Grete getting up to
stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There's
perhaps some distinction to be made between 'finished' and 'ended.'
Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach
points out that none of the three novels were 'completed.' Some
pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop-it doesn't
matter!-after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto,
the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into
these things is astonishing."
Published originally in 1926 and left ambiguous even to the day of
Kafka's death, El castillo represents the high point of his writing
career. Throughout the book, Mr. K is subjected to the intricate
labyrinths of power and conflict, where to be human is to be a
slave to a system that will use and then ultimately reject him.
La frustraciÓn, la burocracia y la alienaciÓn del
individuo en su afÁn de formar parte de un sistema que
invariablemente lo rechaza son temas recurrentes en la obra de
Franz Kafka y, particularmente, en El Castillo. Publicado
originalmente en 1926, este libro que el autor dejÓ inconcluso al
dÍa de su muerte representa una de las mÁximas cumbres de su
producciÓn y ocupa un sitial de privilegio en las letras
universales. El seÑor K, un individuo como cualquier otro, se ve
sometido a los intrincados laberintos del poder, conflicto que
anticipa los tiempos que vivimos, donde el ser humano parece
esclavo de sistemas que lo utilizan para luego descartarlo.
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The Trial (Paperback)
Franz Kafka; Translated by Richard Stokes
1
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R220
R176
Discovery Miles 1 760
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On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous pre-figuration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.
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The Trial (Paperback)
Franz Kafka; Translated by David Wyllie
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R220
R184
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"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had
done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its
gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term
""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank
clerk's entrapment -- based on an undisclosed charge -- in a maze
of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks.
Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's
engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated
individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals
raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of
government and the nature of justice. This inexpensive edition of
one of the 20th century's most important novels features an
acclaimed translation by David Wyllie.
This collection of new translations brings together the small
proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of
publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an
exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; 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 fascinating occasional piece, and
The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air
display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of
Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of
his thought.
Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis - arguably the greatest, most famous
and most unnerving short work of literary fiction ever written - is
a hundred years old in 2015. This centenary edition offers the
first complete English translation of Kafka's text (by A. L. Lloyd
from 1937) plus a richly detailed new introduction to the story by
novelist Richard T. Kelly, describing its genesis and the life of
its creator. In The Metamorphosis' unforgettable opening sentence
we meet travelling salesman Gregor Samsa - on a rare overnight stay
in the apartment he shares with his family, paid for by his
ceaseless labour - who awakes one morning 'from a troubled dream'
to find himself 'changed in his bed to some kind of monstrous
vermin'. 'There is nothing which The Metamorphosis could be
surpassed by - one of the few great, perfect poetic works of this
century.' Elias Canetti 'My greatest masterpieces of
twentieth-century prose are, in this order, Joyce's Ulysses,
Kafka's [Metamorphosis], Bely's Petersburg and the first half of
Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.' Vladimir Nabokov
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The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka; Edited by 'Reiner Stach; Translated by Shelley Frisch
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R404
Discovery Miles 4 040
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern
literature—featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka’s
acclaimed biographer In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of
more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the
Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most
mysterious of Kafka’s writings, they explore philosophical
questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory
world. This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these
extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka’s
mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka
biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and freshly translated by
Shelley Frisch, this beautiful volume presents each aphorism on its
own page in English and the original German, with accessible and
enlightening notes on facing pages. The most complex of Kafka’s
writings, the aphorisms merge literary and analytical thinking and
are radical in their ideas, original in their images and metaphors,
and exceptionally condensed in their language. Offering up
Kafka’s characteristically unsettling charms, the aphorisms at
times put readers in unfamiliar, even inhospitable territory, which
can then turn luminous: “I have never been in this place before:
breathing works differently, and a star shines next to the sun,
more dazzlingly still.” Above all, this volume reveals that these
multifaceted gems aren’t far removed from Kafka’s novels and
stories but are instead situated squarely within his
cosmos—arguably at its very core. Long neglected by Kafka readers
and scholars, his aphorisms have finally been given their full due
here.
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