The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors •...

"Here is the story of young Karl Rossman, who, following an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. With unquenchable optimism and in the company of two comic-sinister companions, he throws himself into misadventure, eventually heading towards Oklahoma, where a career in the theater beckons. Though we can never know how Kafka planned to end the novel, Harman's superb translation allows us to appreciate, as closely as...

"Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka's death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth...

A surveyor is lost in a labyrinth in this 1926 German novel, reflecting the author's concern with man's inability to assert himself in the face of bureaucracy. It is a new translation that restores the eccentricities in style of the original.

"This volume brings together everything that Franz Kafka himself published during his lifetime, all those works, that is, which he thought finished enough to permit of their being published. We know that Kafka possessed a fanatical artistic scrupulosity, one that rivaled Flaubert's in its rigor, and so it comes as no surprise that this collection should also be the most powerful Kafka volume ever published"--