Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up one day to find that he has transformed into a giant insect. His family is disgusted with him, especially when he is no longer able to earn income. Gregor eventually dies after deciding that he is a burden to his family.

This selection from the first ten years of the Evergreen Review gives the full flavor of the energy, savvy, excitement, and gall that characterized the magazine during the days of its publication. It also happens to bring together some of the world’s best writers in one volume, in the company of their peers. Evergreen was more than another literary magazine. Founded by Barney Rossett of Grove Press and publishing from 1957 through 1973 (it now exists as an online only magazine), it was the voice of a movement that helped to change the attitudes and prejudices of the culture at large through the language of art—and succeeded. It was always damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Here are original short stories by Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac (with his “October in the Railroad Earth” predating the publication of On the Road ); Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (previously published only as a pamphlet); a selection from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind ; and a passage from Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book . Also included are a fantastic sample of the original and iconic magazine covers which were works of art themselves—a heavily bearded Ginsberg cavorting in a sport coat and Uncle Sam top hat in 1966—and several reprinted comic strips; notably, Michael O’Donoghue’s “The Adventure of Phoebe Zeit-geist.”

The book you hold in your hands is a ticket to the exotic shores of British Hidalgo, a tiny Central American land of jungles and coral reefs, wonderful people and strange customs, strong rum and sunny skies. Collected here for the first time, Avram Davidson's six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is "a place that you can put your arms around," welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast. Afloat and ashore, Jack Limekiller, master of the working sailboat Saccharissa, encounters ghosts of the colonial past and monsters far older. The tropical paradise where Avram Davidson lived and wrote in the 1960s no longer exists in our world, but, as Lucius Shepard writes in his introduction, "That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you -- a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves..." Book jacket.