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.
