An original, inventive new biography of Franz Kafka - and his readers

'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.' Marina Warner In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

"An indispensable companion for any student of Kafka" - New Statesman

"Karolina Watroba goes in search of the afterlives of Kafka, who, like some form of ghostly artificial intelligence, still seems to be processing our world and offering miraculously fresh insights. Posthumously, Kafka's genius only swells" - Financial Times

"[A] brisk and lively study ... bright, accessible and chatty, Watroba's book holds Kafka up to the light to reveal fragments of his elliptical appeal" - The List

"Animated ... admirable ... takes the reader from Oxford to Berlin, Prague to Tel Aviv, and China to South Korea" - Literary Review

"A new biography of [Kafka]'s afterlife that traces the author's reception worldwide ... one of Kafka's greatest literary achievements is his ability to metamorphose" - Economist

"Published to mark the centenary of Kafka's death, this is an inventive biography that presents the absurdist master as a writer for our times" - New Statesman

"'Economically combines a great deal of information about Kafka's life and writings with a rich account of what modern readers have made of him ... This deft and generous book finds room not only for the many sides of him but for a whole smörgåsbord of legacies and afterlives that explode the cliche of the Kafkaesque" - Observer