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One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century - Elias Canetti on The TransformationA companion volume to The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, these new translations bring together the small number of Kafka's stories that he thought worthy of publication.This volume contains his most famous story. The Transformation, more popularly known as Metamorphosis. Other works include Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and, A Fasting Artist, a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka's life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.Front cover drawing by Franz Kafka

A surreal nouveau-Gothic story set in a 1920s seaside hotel, exploring themes of death.

At convent school, a girl acquires romantic notions of a lover who will live for her alone. She marries a kind but dull country doctor and discovers that "This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart." Emma Bovary's quest for escape from the emptiness of her bourgeois existence leads to infidelity and financial extravagance, and Gustave Flaubert's powerful and deeply moving examination of her moral degeneration is universally regarded as a landmark of nineteenth-century fiction. Flaubert was brought to trial by the French government on the grounds of this novel's alleged immorality but narrowly escaped conviction. Madame Bovary remains a touchstone for literary discussions of provincial life and adultery as well as a summit of prose art, a pioneering work of realism that forever changed the way novels are written. This complete and unabridged edition features the classic translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.