The transformation

A traveling cloth seller wakes up one morning to realize that he is very late for work. His tardiness fills him with anxiety about his future and the future of his family; and despite his diligent efforts to start another day at the same thankless job, he faces a fundamental physical difficulty: he has been transformed into a monstrous insect.

Beyond its famous first sentence—one of the most shocking in the history of world literature—, the Transformation It is a story perfectly told, an idea constantly reinterpreted, an existential myth that defined the collective consciousness of the 20th century.