Our virtual classics book club is reading The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka this January. A tragicomic masterpiece of alienation and abjection, The Metamorphosis is a quick read—more of a short story than a novella—and endlessly resonant.
Ilan Stavans, our publisher and Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, will lead the discussion, hosted by the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst.
Gregor Samsa’s struggle with self and with modern life continues to fascinate and move all of us who have woken up to find ourselves trapped in a carapace of some kind—of shame, dread, pain, or self-reproach (and who hasn’t?). Don’t worry; it’s very funny, too.
If you’d like a bit of background reading before our discussion, here is Susan Bernofsky’s afterword to her 2014 translation via The New Yorker; and here is Richard T. Kelly in The Guardian with 100 thoughts for 100 years of The Metamorphosis.
From the original cover of Die Verwandlung, 1915.
When: Wednesday, January 27 at 8 pm ET
Where: via Zoom. Please register through the New York Public Library (you don’t need to be a patron to register).
About the Host
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."