The Diaries of Franz Kafka (PENGUIN CLASSICS) - Softcover

Kafka, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241695759 ISBN 13: 9780241695753

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Franz Kafka (Author)
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.

Ross Benjamin (Translator)
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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241695759
• ISBN 13: 9780241695753
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 704