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Summary: Look, I'm a Bug!
Review: "Look, I'm a Bug!" No, no, no... the plight of Gregor Samsa as he awoke as a beetle is no laughing matter. In this tidy little Dover edition, Kafka's famous short story breathes of the futility and alienation men face, and the fear in the midst of it all."The Metamorphosis and Other Stories" is worth every penny. The beauty of the Dover edition is the ability to sample Kafka, rather than indulge in a complete works. He is not for everyone, but at such an inexpensive price, you'll get to taste his style and complex ideas. Note that there are several stories here, including the oddly-styled one paragraph "A Country Doctor," which effectively challenges the view of common man of the almost godlike pedestal we put doctors on. Stories include:
The Judgment
The Metamorphosis
In a Penal Colony
A Country Doctor
A Report to an Academy I fully recommend "The Metamorphosis and Other Stories" by Franz Kafka. The price can't be beat, and would make a great addition to a larger Amazon purchase. Anthony Trendl
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Summary: A timeless masterpiece of tragedy and decay.
Review: As a teenager, reading "Metamorphosis" was a moment of quiet awakening, the opening lines so perfectly capturing the accompanying feelings of alienation and confusion. "'What has happened to me?', he thought. It was no dream.". It's a brilliantly complex story, that weaves various allegories amongst its emotionally devastating pages. It can be viewed as an allegory for the imprisonment of the soul in the body, or as a comment on dysfunctional family relations, or as a simple tale of one man rejected by everyone around him, save for simple little moments of genuine human interaction. Ultimately, though, it's a tragic story of decay (a theme that penetrated much of his work), and one of the most devastating, saddeningly deadpan stories ever put to paper.
Rating: 
Summary: More than just "The Metamorphosis"
Review: As someone who had only read "The Metamorphosis," I found this collection of Kafka's works to be very refreshing. Since I had not enjoyed reading "The Metamorphosis" in high school I was skeptical about reading other works by Kafka. I was pleasantly surprised when I read "In the Penal Colony", "A Country Doctor", and "A Report to an Academy." These works were assigned as part of a college class I had, and I found that they were not only very personally thought provoking, but they inspired a lot of insightful in-class discussion. I would recommend this collection to anyone who has not yet read any of Kafka's works, or who have only read The Metamorphosis.
Rating:
Summary: More than just "The Metamorphosis"
Review: As someone who had only read "The Metamorphosis," I found this collection of Kafka's works to be very refreshing. Since I had not enjoyed reading "The Metamorphosis" in high school I was skeptical about reading other works by Kafka. I was pleasantly surprised when I read "In the Penal Colony", "A Country Doctor", and "A Report to an Academy." These works were assigned as part of a college class I had, and I found that they were not only very personally thought provoking, but they inspired a lot of insightful in-class discussion. I would recommend this collection to anyone who has not yet read any of Kafka's works, or who have only read The Metamorphosis.
Rating: 
Summary: Not great
Review: Despite the enthusiasm with which High School students appraoch this story about a man turned into a giant bug, it is not a very compelling story. It is, I suppose, of some literary merit, however, it is not very entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: Powerfully Disturbing
Review: 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.
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Summary: compelling: there is something about this story
Review: I have never been able to determine what it is about this story that I find so compelling. I don't have a defeated and alienated outlook, but still I relate to Gregor. More than that, I feel compassion for him. It's such a deeply sad story, and it says so much about the way people can objectify others. His family really uses him for their own selfish comfort, rather than truly loving him for who he is. For some strange reason, though, I find some hope in the story. By telling it, Kafka tells us that people should not be treated this way, or should not be made to feel unloved or insignificant. As with most moral fiction, the story is negative, I believe, for the purpose of effecting change. We don't have to treat others badly, and we don't have to allow ourselves to become alienated and neglected. By recognizing the pain, we can attempt to change this dynamic. Perhaps I'm too optimistic for the spirit of the story, but that's what I see. I've taught this story to my students, and some of them get that, while others find the story annoying. Still, I continue to be compelled to read it and to teach it again.
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Summary: Portrait of Despair
Review: Kafka is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He masterfulyl portrays the absolute meaninglessness of life in an existence devoid of any spiritual meaning. He accomplishes this in a way that completely captivates the reader, and impresses them with the sheer futility of it all. You may not have fun reading Kafka, but you will be stretched, and it will make you think. The Trial is also another brilliant example of Kafka's literary skill
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Summary: The nightmare of life
Review: 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.
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Summary: Bewilderingly blunt and terrifying. Sizzling in frustration.
Review: Kafka presents to the reader a shockingly horrific account of a man, subservient to his aging parents' financial needs, awakening one morning to find himself a bug. Readers are awestruck by his response to this, as Gregor's immediate thoughts shift to fear of missing the train and the "five or six years of debts" he must pay to his employer on behalf of his parents. Struggling with such "arbitrary confusion", Gregor's journey through several months of living with his disastrous calamity is horrific to his audience in it's disgusting truth in the thrill of the routine and thus we see that this metamorphosis is really strictly a physical one, as Gregor has always been an "insect" and object of income to the household. Splendidly executed, Kafka provokes otherwise dormant sentiments of passiveness and futility in his reader and ultimately elicits bewildering feelings of helplessly gradual servility and suppression in one's environment.
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