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ItemID: #114405
Cost: $5,000.00

Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

“HE FOUND HIMSELF CHANGED IN HIS BED TO SOME MONSTROUS KIND OF VERMIN”

KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis. (London): Parton, 1937. Slim octavo, original half blue cloth, blue paper label; pp. 74. $5000.

First edition in English of one of Kafka’s most important works.

"While critics have interpreted this chilling story variously as a description of despair in a meaningless world, as a reaction to institutional authoritarianism, and as an expression of conflict between the author and his father, its power seems to rest in its resistance to explanation. W.H. Auden has said of it, 'Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka would be the first one would think of" (New York Public Library's Books of the Century, 13). "Kafka published few works in his lifetime and left a testamentary direction that his unpublished writings should be destroyed, which was disregarded by his friend and executor Max Brod," who published The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) after Kafka's death in 1924 (Garland & Garland, 466). Kafka himself published The Metamorphosis in German in 1915. Translated by A.L. Lloyd. Without scarce original glassine.

Minuscule rub to foot of spine. A fine copy.

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