"Metamorphosis, " "in the Penal Colony" and Other Stories

"In Neugroschel's version we see more of Kafka's meaning, his unexpected comedy...we have for the first time the sense of understanding Kafka's complexity and where it might lead us." --Chicago Tribune A classic translation of Kafka's best-known, and most obscure, short fiction--with a new foreword from celebrated writer Ling Ma. Widely recognized as one of the preeminent English-language anthologies of Kafka's stories, this critically acclaimed collection assembles the great short works of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. With masterful attentiveness to the intricacies of Kafka's dialect of Prague German, this is an essential selection of forty-four stories, including such timeless works of fiction as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," and "The Judgment." Brought into the present by a foreword from Ling Ma, Kafka's work has never been more relevant to contemporary literature--nor has Kafka himself ever been a keener observer of the human condition, with his singular apprehension of power, the absurd, and the enigma and alienation at the center of modern living.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague. Widely esteemed as one of the twentieth century's most important writers, he is the author of the novels The Trial and The Castle. Joachim Neugroschel (1938-2011) was the translator of over two hundred books, including works by Marcel Proust, Elias Canetti, and Thomas Mann. Over the course of his career, he received many awards, including the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance and the story collection Bliss Montage. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize in Literature, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and VQR. She lives in Chicago.