We invite you out to help us celebrate the Modern Library Classics edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis, translated, edited, and introduced by Stanley Corngold. Joining Professor Corngold will be his colleague, Michael Jennings. They will discuss the work and some of its renowned readers, including Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin, who are also featured with essays in this beautiful new volume.

“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, Franz 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 inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

This Modern Library edition collects Stanley Corngold’s acclaimed English translation—long hailed as the gold standard by scholars and general readers alike—along with seven critical essays by important writers, as well as background and contextual material, and a new Introduction from Corngold himself.

Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers but is perhaps best known for his translations of and writings on the work of Franz Kafka. He is the author, together with Benno Wagner, of Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine, and co-editor of Kafka for the Twenty-First Century. His translation of Goethe's The Sufferings of the Young Werther was published recently as a Norton Critical Edition. Michael Jennings is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is the author, together with Howard Eiland, of  Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, and the author of Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism. He also serves as the general editor of the standard English-language edition of Benjamin's works, and is the editor of a series of collections of Benjamin's essays intended for classroom use.