The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Author: Franz Kafka

Translators: Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

"From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka ceased to keep a diary, for which he had used quarto-size notebooks, instead writing in a series of smaller, octavo-size notebooks. When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks―which include short stories, fragments of stories and other literary writings―because, he wrote, 'notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception.' The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known and yet are among the most characteristic and brilliantly gnomic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms within their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence. Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding.”

—Library Journal