Unpublished during his lifetime, the novels of Franz Kafka are now regarded as among the greatest works of early twentieth-century literature. His most famous and influential piece, Metamorphosis, depicting a man who wakes up to discover he has been turned into an insect, was first published by Penguin in 1961. The frightening stories and fables in this volume describe the cruel absurdities that Kafka believed dominate human life.

It was my good fortune that the building of the wall was just beginning when, at the age of twenty, I had passed the highest examination of the lowest school. I say good fortune, because many who before that time had reached the highest grade of the training available to them could for years put their knowledge to no purpose; they drifted around uselessly with the most grandiose architectural schemes in their heads and went to the bad in shoals. But those who were finally appointed to the great wall as overseers, even of the lowest grade, were really worthy of it. They were men who had reflected deeply on the wall and continued to reflect upon it, men who with the first stone which they sank in the ground felt themselves to some extent a part of it. But such men of course were not only eager to perform work of the greatest thoroughness, they were also fired with impatience to see the building finally erected in its full perfection. The day labourer knows nothing of this impatience, his wage is his only spur, and again the higher overseers, indeed even the overseers of middle rank, see enough of the manifold growth of the structure for it to keep them strong in spirit. But in order to encourage the men of lower rank, whose mental capacity far outstripped their seemingly petty task, other measures had to be taken. One could not, for instance, make them spend months or even years laying stone upon stone in some uninhabited mountain region hundreds of miles from their homes; the hopelessness of such laborious toil, to which no end could be seen even in the longest lifetime, would have reduced them to despair, and above all diminished their fitness for the work.

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If you like this book, you may also like these:

The Mirror of Ink - Jorge Luis Borges
Cloud, Castle, Lake - Vladimir Nabokov
Forgetting Things - Sigmund Freud