Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0553213695, Mass Market Paperback)

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from  unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his  bed into a monstrous vermin." With this  startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first  sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The  Metamorphosis. It is the story of a  young man who, transformed overnight into a giant  beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to  his family, an outsider in his own home, a  quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though  absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of  inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, The  Metamorphosis has taken its place as one  of the mosst widely read and influential works of  twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote,  "Kafka is important to us because his predicament  is the predicament of modern man."

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0140283366, Paperback)

"Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of."-- W. H. Auden

Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0822207516, Paperback)

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis climaxes in the very first line--the protagonist has indeed been transformed. The critical questions lie in the interpretation of the transformation. Kafka has been said to have offered everything from a psychological parable of Oedipal struggle to a caricature of psychological readings.

The title, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Franz Kafka, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.