Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis)

by Kafka, Franz

$10,500 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · In dust jacket

Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915. First edition. Very Good/Very Good. First edition, first printing. 73, [1], [5, ads], [1] pp. The preferred issue bound in publisher's red wrappers with beige printed dust jacket illustrated by the German Expressionist Ottomar Starke. Very Good with lean to binding, small tear at crown, and creasing to spine and edges. Light toning and slight discoloration to cover, label removed with residue on front red wrapper. Foxing to textblock edges and margins of contents, light toning throughout with small closed tear to inner margin of p. 10 not affecting text. One of the only books published in Kafka's short lifetime, an initial flop that scarcely sold more than 400 out of 800 copies on first printing. "This 'exceptionally repulsive story' is the most sustained work of fiction published during Kafka's lifetime and the one with which his name is most profoundly associated in the common conscious... In his critical hierarchy of the great prose works of the Twentieth Century, Vladimir Nabokov rates Die Verwandlung second behind only James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that is twenty or more times its length." The Breon Mitchell Collection of the Works of Franz Kafka, p. 7; Flores p.4.

• Publisher: Kurt Wolff Verlag
• Year: 1915
• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: first
• Binding: unknown

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