Sir John Malcolm Sabine Pasley was a literary scholar and Fellow of the British Academy, renowned for his dedicated work in publishing the writings of Franz Kafka. Following extensive negotiations, he personally took possession of Kafka's manuscripts that had been entrusted to Max Brod. In 1961, Pasley facilitated the transport of these significant literary works from Switzerland to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His scholarly efforts were instrumental in preserving and disseminating Kafka's unique literary legacy.
The central theme of this collection of essays is the basic tension in Nietzsche, and so in his work, between the urge to weave a satisfying web out of reality and the equally strong compulsion to expose its painful truths.
In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all'. as among the greatest works of early twentieth-century literature. His most famous and influential work, Metamorphosis, depicting a man who wakes up to discover he has been turned into an insect, was first published by Penguin in 1961. These lucid stories and brief fables describe the cruel absurdities he believed dominate human life.