Metamorphosis

'One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.' Gregor, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and his sister Grete, at first worries mainly that he has missed his train. His family is horrified. Grete feeds him for a while, the father drives him back into his room and wounds him with an apple that stays lodged in his back, and the family takes in lodgers to make ends meet, while Gregor, shut away, listens to their lives continue without him.

Franz Kafka wrote the story at the end of 1912 and published it in 1915; he insisted that the insect itself should not be drawn on the cover. In under a hundred pages it captures loneliness, guilt and how love can turn into duty and then into relief. This translation is by David Wyllie, who also translated Kafka's novel The Trial.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague into a German-speaking Jewish family, studied law and spent his working life as a conscientious official at an insurance institute for workers' accidents. He wrote at night, in a few intense bursts, and published only a handful of stories in his lifetime.

Dying of tuberculosis at forty, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts; Brod refused and published The Trial, The Castle and much more. Kafka's dreamlike stories of guilt, bureaucracy and isolation gave the world the word 'Kafkaesque', and few twentieth-century writers have been more influential.