Blue Octavo Notebooks

Originally omitted from Kafka's famous diaries, these notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms

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...