In the eccentric world of Franz Kafka, salesmen turn into giant bugs, apes give lectures at college academies, and nightmares probe the mysteries of modern humanity’s unhappiness. More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity.‘The Metamorphosis and Other Stories’ divulge the author’s extraordinary talent in a variety of forms—prose poems, short stories, sketches, allegories, and novelettes—and showcases the straightfaced humor, startling psychological insight, and haunting imagination for which he is revered as a modern master. In addition to ‘The Metamorphosis’, this collection includes Early Stories, Contemplation, The Judgement, The Stoker, In the Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor."Then birds flew up like a shower of sparks, I followed them with my eyes and saw how they rose in a single breath until they seemed no longer to be rising but I to be falling..."—Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis and Other Stories)