| |
Pre-1950s |
| |
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Black Spring, Henry Miller
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Demian, Hermann Hesse
Embers, Sándor Márai
Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Howards End, E.M. Forster
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Poetical Works of John Keats, John Keats
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Lost Face, Jack London
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
The Poems of Dylan Thomas, Dylan Thomas
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë |
|
|
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Die Verwandlung, Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1915 (Germany)
Classix Press, (US), Translated by David Wyllie
It’s shocking, what can suddenly happen to a person!
We are kids, off from school for summer vacation, leaping into pools of freedom, exempt from time. We are parents, purchasers of diapers and butt wipes, vehicles and homes. We are brothers and sisters, genetically mapped. We are grandparents disintegrating into the sunset. We are friends, accepting invites to baptisms, birthdays, graduations, picnics. We are brides and grooms, bridal parties and guests, the wait staff too. We are bound by love and a faith in eternity.
But what now, if all this peace and wealth and comfort should come to a horrible and frightening end? That was something that Gregor did not want to think about too much, so he started to move about, crawling up and down the room.
We are grade point averages and SATs and verbs on college entrance essays. We are bullet points on resumes, ink on cover letters, professionals and providers, cooks, and the food on the table. We are paychecks, a net worth, and we are calculated after tax. We are spouses on insurance plans, test results, debt. We are families that grow apart as dictated by the geography of job offers or human nature. We are forced to euthanize sick pets. We are senile. We are co-signers who place parents in homes to die alone in dementia. We are the demented. We are unemployed, unable to provide, unable to pay. We are separated and divorced, bound by grudges, court orders, and fear. We are drug addicts and whores, yesterday and tomorrow. We are segments of society’s hierarchy, human beings and vermin.
-G
|
|
 |
PRINT
TWITTER
FACEBOOK
EMAIL
MORE