Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications — notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones.
By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive — and often surprisingly unpolished — writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.
"This new edition restores the variegated richness of the diaries ... Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us" Guardian
"A new translation of the writer’s diaries from his twenties restores them to how he wrote them: chaotic, sometimes incoherent and full of black comedy. Thrilling … The diaries will open your eyes." John Self, The Times
"One of the finest translating achievements in recent history." Literary Review
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. Several of his story collections were published in his lifetime and his novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, were published posthumously by his editor Max Brod.
