The Blue Octavo Notebooks

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 Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he decided to omit these notebooks, explaining in a postscript that the diaries, “have a composition different from the ‘blue octavo notebooks,’ which are made up almost entirely of literary ideas, fragments and aphorisms (without reference to the everyday world).... Notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception.” Max Brod included the blue octavo notebooks in a volume of fragments and other uncollected writings published in 1953, but they have remained in relative obscurity; this volume represents their first paperback publication in English.
Along with the blue octavo notebooks, Max Brod found a series of extracts from them, copied out and numbered (but not titled) by Kafka. These he called, “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way,” and published in the same volume of fragments. When these papers first appeared in English, the extracts were removed from the text of the notebooks to avoid repetition. For this edition the extracts have been restored to the context of the notebooks, following the German edition of Kafka’s work, and also printed separately in the order Kafka left them.
Max Brod’s original notes are included at the end of the text.