The Diaries of Franz Kafka
  • Published: 2 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802065749
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 704

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
30 Jul 2024
EBook
2 May 2024
Hardback
28 Feb 2023
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An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries — revealing the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential 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.
  • Published: 2 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802065749
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 704
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About the author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.

portrait photo of Franz Kafka

Also by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis: Popular Penguins
Metamorphosis
The Trial: Popular Penguins
Investigations of a Dog
The Trial
The Complete Novels
Letters to Milena
See all

Praise for The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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

Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation is the first to convey the full extent of the twitchy tenuousness [of Kafka’s diaries]

Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker

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 unabridged volume of Franz Kafka's diaries restores the rough edges and impulses that were buffed out of past editions

The New York Times
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