"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, 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. As W.H. Auden wrote,  "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man." Author - Franz Kafka Number of Pages - 224 Format - Mass Market Publisher - Bantam Dell Published - 1972-02-01