Search results for ""author michael hoffman""

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories.'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' - Vladimir Nabokov

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Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Z?ndel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent... At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Z?ndel seems on the verge of falling to bits, as do his words, thoughts, wife, and world--will there be anything left, and anyone to hold the pieces? "Z?ndel's Exit" is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it's coming or going.

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