Book cover of The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Book description

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

'The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world' - The Wall Street Journal

Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Diaries of Franz Kafka as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In late high-heat summer, I sat reading in the forest-park near our house in our Ontario town. While my daughter played with her friends, I delved into Kafka’s Diaries. Another parent passed by. “What’re you reading?” she asked. “My bible,” I said. “Oh? …Which version?” “Kafka’s,” I said.

I took K.’s book everywhere through the fall. A task. It’s 670 pages, in a large-sized format.
Why Kafka years into the 21st century? There is K.: he’s endured, prevailed in his tragi-absurd precognitions of tyrannical systems. “And yet. No ‘and yet’”, he wrote: his prophetic presence looms over what we…

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The Gates of Polished Horn by Mark A. Rayner,

What happens when you’re face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?

Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this question—what Homer called passing through The…

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