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.  

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 fresh translation of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" from David Wyllie.

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