A tip of the hat to Octavio Roca for alerting me to this New York Times review of the first-ever unabridged edition of The Diaries of Franz Kafka, which the novelist kept from 1909 until 1923, not long before his death. Translated by Ross Benjamin, the diaries contain many passages that Kafka's friend Max Brod cut from the original publication to protect Kafka's reputation. These include a line in which Kafka notices "a large bulge" in another man's pants on a train, and a sentence that Brod ended at the comma: "2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one's tongue along them." (Oh my!)
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