Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Hello and welcome to the nightmare world of Franz Kafka.

Today we are talking about the metamorphosis,

and this is one of the most bizarre and yet simultaneously most relatable short stories I have ever read,

which may seem like a strange thing to say given what takes place

in the story. Our induction into this nightmare reality is immediate. It's right from the very first

line, a line that is the most iconic in all of short, modern, imaginative

literature. Let's read and appreciate that opening together now. It goes like this. When Grigor

Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.

He lay on his tough, armoured back, and, raising his head a little, managed to see,

sectioned off by little crescent-shaped ridges into segments, the expanse of his arched brown belly,

atop which the coverlet perched, forever on the point of slipping off entirely.

His numerous legs, pathetically frail, by contrast to the rest of him, waved feebly before his eyes.

How is that relatable?

We might ask, have I ever awoken from troubled dreams to find myself turned into a monstrous

cockroach or a beetle, a giant insect or some vermin in my bed. The reality of what Grigor has

...