Your Daily Penguin: The Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition Kafka!

[BlackOak-pm]

I would like to hear more about your book journal.

[aaronfacer]

I had no idea that I needed another Kafka collection before I saw this...

[BooksForEric]

I love The Metamorphosis. I've read it ten or eleven times, and I teach it to my seniors.

[jimsbooksreadingandstuff]

When Kafka read extracts of Metamorphosis to his friends he would laugh, I think maybe some of the comedy of Kafka is lost in translation. Like the comedy of the Bible, I imagine the camel passing through the eye of the needle would have been hilarious told in the original Aramaic but now it is looked on far too seriously. This month April 2025 marks the 100th Anniversary of the publication of the Trial, first published in April 26, 1925, a year after Kafka's death.

[TheBookishBuckeye]

I read the Metamorphosis my senior year of high school and enjoyed it. However I did not catch any of the satirical elements of the story like so many people say it has. It just struck me as being really sad. Perhaps I took the story too literally at the time

[valpergalit]

I find those comic artwork covers so tacky and reductive — especially the one for To the Lighthouse, where they show Lily Briscoe thinking “Whatever, bros…” as if Virginia Woolf would ever write that. I know it’s just a marketing gimmick for the meme-speaking BookTok crowd, but I think it’s insulting to the work.