Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding. --Library Journal~From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka stopped writing entries in his diary, which he kept in quarto-sized notebooks, but continued to write in a series of smaller, octavo-sized notebooks. When Kafkas 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, "Notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception." The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known yet are among the most characteristic of Kafkas work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafkas most famous aphorisms in their original context.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.