The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Penguin Classics)

Available for the first time in English, the complete, uncensored diaries of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers

'The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world' - The Wall Street Journal

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.

MEDIA REVIEWS

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

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

An unprecedented, almost 600-page peephole into the mind of a writer whose published prose is otherwise classically abstract and inscrutable. It’s some secret to be let into - Tanjil Rashid, FT

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

This edition of the Diaries seems a model of both scrupulousness and generosity. Here we find the unpolished inner life of one of the most significant writers that ever lived; and the entries, which come from the mind of an ordinary human being and not from some otherworldly realm of inner consciousness, do not in any way detract from Kafka’s work - Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator

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 - Dwight Garner, The New York Times