The Diaries of Franz Kafka

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - 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.

Review

"Essential . . . The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It's an invaluable addition to Kafka's oeuvre."
--The New York Times

"Momentous . . . Life also bursts into literature at the level of form, and in Kafka's diaries even the words are acrobatic. As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a 'laboratory for Kafka's literary production' and thereby catch the author 'in the act of writing.' He has succeeded. Everything in the diaries thrashes . . . [They] are the intimate incisions of an author who could write only by etching words into the flesh."
--The New Yorker

"One of the finest translating achievements in recent history."
--Literary Review

"Benjamin, whose translation is the first complete and uncensored edition of the Diaries to be made available to an English readership . . . begins from scratch the whole business of restoring to the notebooks their 'provisionality, materiality, and mutability . . [His] aim is to give us the writer in his 'workshop, ' blotting the page, changing his mind, running at a sentence a dozen times and still not getting it right."
--The New York Review of Books

"Mr. Benjamin's translation doesn't just supplant the previous edition--it inaugurates a new phase of Kafka's afterlife in English . . . The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world."
--The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 to German-speaking Jewish parents. During his lifetime, he published groundbreaking short stories, including "The Judgment," "The Stoker," and "The Metamorphosis." After his death in 1924, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, defied his testamentary instructions to burn all his unpublished writing. Kafka's posthumous work-- including three unfinished novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika--brought him worldwide renown.

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 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.