The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Until now, the version of Franz Kafka’s diaries available to English-speaking readers was a translation that his best friend and executor, Max Brod, composed from hundreds of pages of notes he had found in twelve journals, which was published in 1948, twenty-four years after the author’s death. And I say “composed” because, out of these disordered fragments, Brod extracted a more or less continuous discourse from which emerged the well-defined image of a writer consumed by the conflict between the demands of his social environment and the desire to devote himself to writing with a superhuman exclusivity and intensity.