Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in a new modern-prose English translation, narrated straight through by Mike Vendetti.

One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect. His first worry is that he is late for work. His family's first worry is what to tell the boarders. A hundred years later, the story still comes across like it was written this morning—the exhaustion, the dread of the phone ringing, the way a family talks about a sick person as if he weren't in the room.

Kafka wrote it in 1915. He never lived to see it in English. This audiobook is a modern-prose rendering of the German original, prepared with the assistance of AI language tools and narrated by Mike Vendetti. Plain contemporary English, told in Kafka's flat, businesslike voice—the voice of a man reasoning through his own transformation as if it were a scheduling problem. That is the joke of the book. That is also the sorrow of it.

The narration is deliberately restrained. Where other editions perform Kafka's horror, this one plays it as Kafka wrote it: quiet, precise, and merciful. Gregor's interior monologue never lifts into panic. His family is not caricatured. The final chapter—Gregor's death at dawn, the family's tram ride into the open country the next afternoon—is read as it was written: as relief.

This updated retelling was scripted in part using Artificial Intelligence.