> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9780805210576
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $35.00

The Metamorphosis




This collection brings together the stories that Kafka allowed to be published during his lifetime. To Max Brod, his literary executor, he wrote: “Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these.”

From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial: A collection that brings together the stories he allowed to be published during his lifetime, including his best-known tale of a man who wakes up transformed into an insect. 

To Max Brod, his literary executor, Kafka wrote: “Of all my writings the only books that can stand are these.”

“Kafka’s survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: ‘With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.’ There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.” —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth and On Beauty

  • Published: 1 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9780805210576
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

Also by Franz Kafka

See all