This thin edition, containing only a few of Kafka's short stoires, seems unlikely to cause the powerfully disturbing reactions that it brings out in its readers. In his story "The Metamorphosis," Kafka writes a tale of how a salesman turns into a bug overnight. As unlikely as this situation sounds, Kafka succeeds in making the situation seem real by going into extreme detail about both the physical and emotional effects of the character's metamorphosis. Although logic prevents anyone from actually believing they may turn into a bug, readers can still relate to the common emotions of the story, of being alienated and unwanted, of being a cumbersme burden unto others. The other stories in the edition are equally engaging and disturbing in their realistic, sometimes frightful descriptions.

Kafka knew so well how to make us feel trapped, estranged and lonely like the characters in his stories. He struggled with anxiety and feelings of inferiority in his own life, and his writing expresses the passive realization that life is a dark and confusing nightmare where we in no way are masters of our destinies. This volume contains five stories, of which the Metamorphosis is the longest and by far the most elaborate and substantial work. A young travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning and realizes that he has been transformed into a giant bug. Having been the provider for his elderly parents and his adolescent sister, he is now forced to crawl around in his room all day, hiding his hideous self from the sister who brings him food, unable to communicate and barred from the world outside. It is a story about being dehumanized and alienated, of being useless and unwanted, of becoming a burden to oneself as well as to others. Kafka is such a phenomenal writer that the mere absurdity of the plot is completely overshadowed by the vivid and somehow realistic descriptions of the emotional and behavioral responses of Gregor and his family to the unreal situation. It is as if Kafka is telling us that this circumstance is no more strange or hopeless than the predicaments faced by the average family. Among the other stories, I found the short "Report to an Academy" particularly compelling. It is the report of a captured ape who has renounced its apehood and become like a human to avoid confinement in the zoo. The ape chose to become a human not because he admired humans in any way, but because it was the only way to escape an unbearable situation. In other words, it is a story about assimilation and accomodation, about the necessity to abandon all individual traits and pre-dispositions to fit in and assure respectability, in short, selling out. Assimilation was of course the order of the day in the late Habsburg Empire, but it may be Kafka's individuality as much as his minority identity which shines through in this short masterpiece. Although not all the stories are of the same quality and contain the same universal insight, the Metamorphosis alone is worth five stars and a strong recommendation.

Don't be fooled by the scant 80 pages in this book...it is a powerful collection of stories. Metamorphosis is truly an amazing short story, about the priority shift of a man who has found himself stuck in the body of a bug. Like most of his other pieces, Kafka deals primarily with the mind, using the despairing feelings of his characters to reach the reader. The other stories, "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor" and others, are equally powerful and equally disturbing, and I recommend this book to anyone interested in reading contemporary classics.

I am not a scholar, but here's my 2¢: It's difficult to find collections of Medieval English poetry; the most one can usually hope to find is a bit of Chaucer mixed with Renaissance poetry.This collection provides a welcome relief with 245 poems separated into several categories: Religious, worldly, love, Christmas, bawdy, and more. My personal favorite is a 15th poem which deals with racism. There are several essays, and all poems are dated and sourced. Why only 4 stars? The poems have been slightly modernized, with regards to capitalization, punctuation, thorns and other archaic letters.