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.

A seminal work by one of the most influential figures of the English folk revival of the 1950s, Folk Song in England (1967) is an expansive account of the development of English traditional song, from the very oldest, ritual verse, through epic balladry, to the development of lyrical song in the industrial era.

In a unique and ambitious approach, Lloyd marries the tradition of folk-song scholarship, largely derived from Cecil Sharp, with the radical historiography of E. P. Thompson, and in so doing produces a work of exceptional insight. In particular, his defining of 'industrial folk song' reveals traditional verse as an ebullient, living expression of the working people, perfectly adaptable to reflect their ways and conditions of life.

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

A. L. Lloyd was nothing if not versatile, ethnomusicologist, journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and translator. It is as the author of Folk Song in England, also reissued in Faber Finds, that he is best known, but, in this his centenary year (2008) Faber Finds is also celebrating him as a translator. 1937 was A. L. Lloyd's annus mirabilis as a translator. In it he published both his translations of Lorca - Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter - and Kafka's Metamorphosis. There aren't many who can translate with equal facility from Spanish and German. Not only did A. L. Lloyd do that, his translations were both firsts, the first translation of Lorca into English and the first English translation of Kafka's most famous story. On first publication A. L. Lloyd's Lorca translation was widely praised with V. S. Pritchett especially commending it in The New Statesman.

This volume makes available, for the first time in English, some of the major writings of the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brailoiu. Despite the size and importance of his work and the fact that he was one of the leading ethnomusicologists of his day, Brailoiu has hitherto remained little known to English-speaking scholars. A. L. Lloyd has performed a valuable service by translating a collection of some of his most important theoretical works. These works are the product of meticulous fieldwork and methodological reflection. Brailoiu's broad-minded approach to both the musicological and sociological problems confronted has ensured that they remain indispensable material for all ethnomusicologists.