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.

A collection of favorite poems. One of them is by Stephen Crane, who wrote: "I saw a man pursuing the horizon; / Round and round they sped. / I was disturbed at this; / I accosted the man. It's futile, I said, / You can never ̓/ You lie, he cried, / And ran on."

“… the shadows of death are the spices of love, and eternal life would be the school of absolute coldness. We love a being that the morrows threaten, and love her all the more as she is more threatened….” Albert Caraco was born in 1919 in Constantinople in a Jewish family established in Turkey for four centuries. He grew up in Prague, Berlin, and Paris, where he attended Janson-de-Sailly high school, and got his degree from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. In 1939, he and his parents fled Europe to South America at the break of World War II, and settled in Montevideo after living in Brazil and Argentina, where his first books were published. Albert Caraco acquired Uruguayan citizenship and retained it for the rest of his life. Back in Paris in 1949, he started writing his immense body of work, part of which remains unpublished to this day. An ambiguous figure, Albert Caraco built nothing short of a baroque literary cathedral, rife with contradictions, yet rising from an uncompromisingly pessimistic foundation. In 1971, consistent with what he had announced recurrently in his semainiers (weekly diaries), he killed himself just a few hours after his father died. The death of his mother in 1963 was the occasion for a reckoning of his relationship with the woman he reproached for having given him birth, while praising her for forming his taste and character and uprooting the sheer possibility of consoling illusions in her only son. The result was Post Mortem, a bittersweet lament and a love poem in prose that offers a glimpse into his bleak worldview and an abstract of his works.

This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.