A new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications.
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 ... This edition scuffs him up and returns him to earth, in an intimate manner that does no injury to our sense of his suffering, or his profound and original gifts.
Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation... is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness ... As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a 'laboratory for Kafka’s literary production' and thereby catch the author 'in the act of writing.' He has succeeded.
Ross Benjamin has done an admirable job of bringing readers the full text of these many journals, reflecting accurately the obsessive nature of Kafka’s thinking ... Kafka has never been so fully present, as both a man and a writer.