It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis . Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony...

"After his mistreatment at the hands of his brother, William Crimsworth is relieved of his employment as a clergyman and offered a position at an all-boys boarding school in Belgium. Soon, word of his proficiency as a professor spread and he is offered a second position in a neighboring all-girls school. He accepts the offer and discovers that there is something special to one of the teachers named Frances?"--Amazon.

This book is the earliest and most influential of the Gothic novels. First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." He gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting...

"Plutarch's biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans are renowned not just for their historical importance but also for their insights into the personalities they describe. In prose that is rich, elegant, and sprinkled with learned references, Plutarch explores with an extraordinary degree of insight the interplay of character and political action. He portrays virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided, but his purpose is implicitly to warn and...

"These three major plays represent a decisive turning-point in Ibsen's scheme of values." "Hurt and dismayed by the hostile reception of Ghosts in 1881, Ibsen published, a year later, the uncompromising An Enemy of the People. Its protagonist, Dr Stockmann, finds himself up against an alliance of political hypocrisy and vested interest when he attempts to reveal that the town's public baths, its civic pride and joy, are seriously polluted. The Wild...

"Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific task. Through, for instance, Heraclitus' enigmatic sayings, the poetry of Parmenides and Empedocles, and Zeno's paradoxes, the Western world was introduced...