Our author will be Franz Kafka, and we’ll read and discuss what is perhaps his best-known short story/novella, “The Metamorphosis,” and his much shorter story “A Report to an

Academy.”  “The Metamorphosis” is the story of a young man who wakes up one morning from “troubled dreams” to discover that he has been transformed into a giant, “verminous” insect.  Like Nikolai Gogol’s story, “The Nose,” which we read last year, it’s an example of what came to be called “absurdist fiction,” in which something physically impossible in the real world is a metaphor for something that is happening in a person’s psyche and relationships. Our other story, “A Report to an Academy,” is an example of Kafka’s humor:  a speech by an ape (probably intended to be a chimpanzee) who tells his story as one who has, through considerable training, been able to move beyond his “ape nature” and live fully in the human world, performing in vaudeville.  Both stories are available in a cheap Dover Thrift paperback, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, or online in pdf versions.