“The Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka’s best-known story, is both harrowing and amusing, a landmark in modern literature and the epitome of Kafka’s parabolic style. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing strikingly contrasts with the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize the anxiety and alienation of mankind in the modern world—as Kafka saw it, a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized place. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the world’s most widely read and discussed authors. Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. Both “The Judgment,” which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and “The Stoker,” which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are included. These two, along with “The Metamorphosis,” form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,” and collectively they present a devastating portrait of the modern family. Also included are “In the Penal Colony,” a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and “A Hunger Artist,” a tale about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Introduction and Notes by Jason Baker “The metamorphosis of his writing, Kafka’s real accomplishment, takes readers to a place at once familiar and unfamiliar. Intrigued by this immediacy, critics have celebrated Kafka for his ‘universality.’ This flattery overreaches perhaps, but the term ‘universal’ was not picked by accident. Kafka’s fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It’s a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there’s no map.” —from the introduction by Jason Baker Having earned a degree in English and Comparative Literature from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Jason Baker now lives in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on a novel about the postal system and the death of the written letter. Franz Kafka was born in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish household in Prague. In 1908 Kafka took a position at an insurance agency, which left afternoons and evenings open for writing, and at which he remained until 1922—two years before his death. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, Kafka saw the publication of a limited number of his works during his lifetime, including “The Judgment” (1913); “The Stoker” (1913), for which he received the Fontane Prize in 1915; “The Metamorphosis” (1915); “A Country Doctor” (1919); and “In the Penal Colony” (1919). In 1924 Kafka asked his confidant Max Brod to burn his remaining unpublished manuscripts. Instead, Brod dedicated the rest of his life to the full publication of Kafka’s works, among them the novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927).