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Rating: 
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
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.
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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.
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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.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit confused . . .
Review: There is something to this story, but I'm at a loss as to what it is. Misery loves company, maybe. Part of the problem is that I am not sure what Kafka's metaphor is representing. The closest thing I can see is someone getting into a crippling accident, and the family getting alientated by all the care they have to give to the relative. Image what Christopher Reeves' family is going though right now since he is paralyzed. I will meet Kafka's Gregor Samsa with Tolstoy's Platon Karatayev from "War and Peace". Platon (Plato?) was a prisoner of the French during their invasion of Moscow in 1813. Instead of curling up into a ball, Platon always busied himself in helping other prisoners. In other words, he was a prefiguring of Victor Frankel in Auschwitz. Tolstoy said that Platon was like a large ball of light who expanded, then disappeared. We may undergo a physical change, such as paralysis, or the slow march of old age, but our soul is immortal. It stays the same, and never ages. This body is vile and will be worm-food soon enough. But the soul is differnt. We change out own soul. The bug-man Samsa still had his soul, though stuill a bug, as Platon still had his his free soul, though still a prisoner. Although I think this book may really be about Samsa's family (a dimesnion of change that Ovid missed), and not the bug-man! I'm still the same person weather I'm wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt, or have one arm or two arms, coiffed or bald. I only change if I sell my soul, or perfect my soul! That is the REAL change and metamorphasis! A rather distasteful slice of nihilistic pie.
Rating:
Summary: Powerfully Disturbing
Review: 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 cumbersome burden unto others. The other stories in the edition are equally engaging and disturbing in their realistic, sometimes frightful descriptions.
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Summary: Fascinated in fear and anxiety
Review: Three of these stories , " The Metamorphosis ' ' The Penal Colony' ' The Country Doctor' are among the most Kafkaesque of Kafka's stories. They awaken in the reader a vague anxiety, a confusion, a sense of disturbance it is difficult to adequately describe. They give us a sense of life as something more menacing and threatening than we had imagined. And yet they do this with such a precise and even beautiful description of inner and outer reality so as to fascinate us completely. They hold us as their narratives procede in their own incredible ways to an ending which too is forever vague and unclear.
Kafka makes the human soul a startling juxtaposition of anxiety and beauty- in a destiny lost and unclear.
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