London-based book cover designer Jamie Keenan has created a terrific cover for a new paperback edition of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella Metamorphosis. This version, based on a completely new translation by Susan Berofsky, has just been released by W W Norton in the U.S., and has an introduction by Davis Cronenberg. Bernofsky’s translation “strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in the macabre tale.”

I love the way that Keenan was able to cleverly reference the body of a beetle with an old Italian typeface. According to Keenan, he hoped to convey “that shiny black quality that beetles have and that weirdo, fiddly, twitchy thing that a lot of creepy, crawly things have.”