Prologue: what makes Kafka Kafka -- Oxford: English Kafka. Migrations -- Locked out of the library -- Kafka's manuscripts -- Precious like papyrus -- Pandemic read -- Kafka and coronavirus -- Kafka and Brexit -- Berlin: German Kafka. Siegfried doesn't get it -- Somebody else doesn't get it either -- So you want people to know Kafka wrote in German? -- A tale of many plaques -- Circus rider on two horses -- A German education -- On a train across the German lands -- Vienna and Berlin -- Kafka's doll -- Readers on standby -- Prague: Czech Kafka. Into the Kafkorium -- Transformations and retransformations -- 'Grant him a permanent visa!' -- Kafka returns -- From Café Louvre to Café Slavia -- The breakthrough and the bridge -- Father and son -- Another son, another father -- Readers' judgement -- Tale without end -- I came a long way to discover a poor substitute for your company -- Jerusalem: Jewish Kafka. Jewish readers' Kafka -- Kafka and Zionism -- Kafka's Jewishness -- From Yiddish to Hebrew -- Hebrew notebooks -- The Hebrew notebook -- Writing the body -- Reading trails -- Travelling on -- The stakes of travel -- Seoul: Asian Kafka. Kafka arrives in east Asia -- Polar bear reads Kafka -- The animal artists and her message -- Kafka's message reaches Korea -- A 'writers' writer' -- Kafkaesque Korean wave? -- Kafka the feminist -- Milena, Milena, ecstatic -- Korean-Mongolian-German-Czech -- Coda: Kafka in the cloud

"In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, 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, traveling 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 presents a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, combining literary scholarship with the responses of his readers throughout the last century. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history"--