Claude David Books

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, ‘The Metamorphosis’ is accompanied in this volume by a selection of other classic tales and sketches by Kafka – such as ‘The Judgement’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Country Doctor’ – all presented in a lively and meticulous new translation by Christopher Moncrieff.

Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer. Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

Ce volume rassemble l'œuvre poétique de Rilke, incluant ses premiers poèmes, des poèmes extraits de divers cycles, ainsi que des œuvres moins connues. La richesse de sa poésie, souvent éclipsée par les Élégies de Duino et les Sonnets à Orphée, est mise en lumière grâce à cette nouvelle traduction qui présente une bonne moitié de textes inédits pour le public francophone. L'annotation retrace l'évolution de Rilke, depuis ses poèmes de jeunesse célébrant la beauté et les paysages de Bohême jusqu'à ses œuvres plus complexes et énigmatiques. Pour la première fois, des poèmes épars sont regroupés en cycles autonomes, certains étant des choix explicites de Rilke lui-même, comme une seconde partie des Élégies. Des variantes et fragments éclairent également la genèse de ces recueils. En outre, des annotations et des extraits des Sonnets à Orphée sont inclus. Le volume présente également trois pièces de théâtre, intimistes et réalistes, qui évoquent Ibsen. Ces œuvres révèlent une facette d'un auteur ancré dans le XIXe siècle tout en appartenant à la modernité à travers une partie significative de son œuvre.