The Diaries of Franz Kafka - Hardcover

by Franz Kafka (Author), Ross Benjamin (Translator)

An essential new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries--a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.

"An invaluable addition to Kafka's oeuvre."--The New York Times

An essential new translation of Franz Kafka's complete, uncensored diaries--a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most important, influential, and visionary writers 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.

Author Biography

FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including "The Metamorphosis," "The Judgment," and "The Stoker." He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

ROSS BENJAMIN's translations include Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion, Joseph Roth's Job, and Daniel Kehlmann's You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka's diaries.