Poor old Gregor. One day he's depressed about his dreary traveling salesman gig, the next, he's roaching around the apartment and disgusting his family. All that's left is creeping the walls and eating garbage. How's his sis ever going to find a sugar daddy with her grotty bro in tow?

"A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." Franz Kafka Metamorphosis tells the tale of Gregor Samsa, a young salesman, who wakes up one day to find he has turned into "a kind of giant bug". Samsa has been a model of virtue for years, single- handedly supporting his parents and sister, but suddenly he finds himself an outcast in his own home, facing a world in which he no longer has a place. Both harrowing and humorous, Metamorphosis is a strange, subtle and moving story which everyone should read.

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.

This boxset contains 8 terrifying and entertaining horror and fantasy novels: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Lovecraft Compendium by H. P. Lovecraft Dracula by Bram Stoker Classic Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe The Turn of the Screw by Henry James Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, 'The Metamorphosis' is accompanied in this volume by a selection of other classic tales and sketches by Kafka - such as 'The Judgement', 'In the Penal Colony' and 'A Country Doctor' - all presented in a lively and meticulous new translation by Christopher Moncrieff. Contains: 'Children on a Country Road', 'Exposing a Confidence Trickster', 'An Impromptu Walk', 'Resolutions', 'A Trip to the Mountains', 'The Plight of a Bachelor', 'The Shopkeeper', 'Gazing Distractedly out of the Window', 'Walking Home', 'Men Running Past', 'The Passenger', 'Dresses', 'Mutual Rejection', 'For the Consideration of Gentleman Jockeys', 'A Window onto the Street', 'Oh to Be a Red Indian', 'Trees', 'An Unhappy Being', 'The Sentence', 'The Metamorphosis', 'The Penal Colony', 'The New Barrister', 'A Country Doctor', 'Up in the Gods', 'An Old Manuscript', 'The Door of Justice', 'Jackals and Arabs', 'A Visit to the Mine', 'The Next Village', 'A Message from the Emperor', 'The Concerns of a Father', 'Eleven Sons', 'Fratricide', 'A Dream', 'A Report for and Academy', 'First Sorrow', 'The Little Woman', 'The Hunger Artist', 'Josephine the Singer or the Mousefolk', 'The Great Wall of China', 'The Bridge', 'The Truth about Sancho Panza', 'The City Coat of Arms', 'Poseidon', 'The Silence of the Sirens'.

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

A collection of Kafka's greatest short fiction, translated by Michael Hofmann Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, the story of an ordinary man transformed into an insect, is brought together in this collection with the rest of his works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Contemplation, a collection of his earlier short studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and an eyewitness account of an air display. Together, these stories, fragments and miniature gems reveal the breadth of his vision, his sense of the absurd, and above all his acute, uncanny wit.

One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is understandably perturbed and he finds himself an outsider in his own home. In 'Metamorphosis' and the other famous stories included here, Kafka explores the confusing nature of human experience with sly wit and compelling originality.

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancee Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancee, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile. In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature. Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist, victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally, in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

'Dear God!' said the guard. 'Why can't you just co-operate in a situation like yours? You seem to be annoying us needlessly, we who of all your fellow men are most likely to have your interests at heart just now!' Josef K., a senior official in a large bank, is arrested although what he has done is not made clear. His life is thrown into turmoil as he becomes enmeshed in a struggle to prove his innocence. But he is battling against baffling rules administered by a remote and uncaring bureaucracy. And he doesn't help his case by talking when he should be listening. Darkly humorous, The Trial is an unsettling and thought-provoking work which can be interpreted in many different ways. This is a new translation of a singular and compelling novel, one of the great enigmatic works of modern literature.

Josef К., a senior official in a large bank, is arrested although what he has done is never made clear. His life is thrown into turmoil as he becomes enmeshed in a struggle to prove his innocence. But he is battling against baffling rules administered by a remote and uncaring bureaucracy. And he doesn't help his case by talking when he should be listening. Darkly humorous, The Trial is an unsettling and thought-provoking work which can be interpreted in many different ways. This is a new translation of a singular and compelling novel, one of the great enigmatic works of modern literature.

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete.

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

In Kafka's powerful and disturbing novel, an innocent man is arrested and repeatedly interrogated for a crime that is never ever explained. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated from German by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, and features an afterword by David Stuart Davies. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a young bank official named Joseph K is arrested although he has done nothing wrong and is never told what he’s been charged with. The Trial is the chronicle of his fight to prove his innocence, of his struggles and encounters with the invisible Law and the untouchable Court where he must make regular visits. It is an account, ultimately, of state-induced self-destruction presenting in a nightmarish scenario the persecution of the outsider and the incomprehensible machinations of the state. Using the power of simple, straightforward language Kafka draws the reader into this bleak and frightening world so that we too experience the fears, uncertainties and tragedy of Joseph K.