Full AspenCat Catalog

It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis . Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony...

"First performed under heavy censorship in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid public outrage and charges of obscenity. The play's content was radical indeed: teenage sex, suicide, abortion, masturbation, sadomasochism. But even more radical was the unsentimental and brutally authentic comedy with which Wedekind treated it. The story traces the dawning sexual awareness of four teenagers,...

Novel of World War II in which the hero fights the Russians, returns home and is married, goes back to the battlefield and is killed.

A novel of the Holocaust based on the author's own experiences chronicles the ordeal of one family, forced from their home and struggling to cope with the destruction, deprivation, and death around them, from the perspective of a single survivor. The tragic tale of the Lustig family doctor Leopold; his wife, Caroline; their children, Zerlina and Paul; and Caroline's sister, Ida who are sent to the walled city of Ruhenthal after authorities label them...

One hundred stories, each named after a year this century. In one, Erich Maria Remarque gives his views on World War I, in another former Nazis reflect on the good old days, while a third is on the fall of the Berlin Wall from a dead woman's point of view

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). Franz Kafka's 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury,...

Halfdan Rassmussen was born in Copenhagen in 1915 and fought in the Danish resistance during the German occupation. This is a selection of his children's poetry translated into English.