The Blue Octavo Notebooks
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The Blue Octavo Notebooks
''The Blue Octavo Notebooks'' (sometimes referred to as ''The Eight Octavo Notebooks'') is a series of eight notebooks written by Franz Kafka from late 1917 until June 1919. The name was given to them by Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, to differentiate them from the regular quarto-sized notebooks Kafka used as diaries. Along with the octavo notebooks, Brod also found a series of extracts copied out and numbered by Kafka. Brod named this brief selection "Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way" and included it in '' The Great Wall of China''. Publication When Brod published Kafka's diaries in 1948 he decided to omit the octavo notebooks as he considered their contents more philosophical and literary than the regular diaries Kafka kept. The Octavo notebooks were later included in a volume of fragments and uncollected writings published in 1953, along with the numbered extracts. The notebooks first appeared in English in ''Dearest Father. Stories and Other Writings ...
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Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels ''The Trial'' and '' The Castle''. The term ''Kafkaesque'' has entered English to describe absurd situations, like those depicted in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-ti ...
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Max Brod
Max Brod ( he, מקס ברוד; 27 May 1884 – 20 December 1968) was a German-speaking Bohemian, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is best remembered as the friend and biographer of writer Franz Kafka. Kafka named Brod as his literary executor, instructing Brod to burn his unpublished work upon his death. Brod refused and had Kafka's works published instead. In 1939, as the Nazis took over Prague, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, taking with him a suitcase of Kafka's papers, many of them unpublished notes, diaries, and sketches. Biography Max Brod was born in Prague, then part of the province of Bohemia in Austria-Hungary, now the capital of the Czech Republic. At the age of four, Brod was diagnosed with a severe spinal curvature and spent a year in corrective harness; despite this he would be a hunchback his entire life. A German-speaking Jew, he attended the Piarist school together with his lifel ...
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The Great Wall Of China (collection)
''The Great Wall of China'' (german: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer) is the first posthumous collection of short stories by Franz Kafka published in Germany in 1931. It was edited by Max Brod and Hans Joachim Schoeps and collected previously unpublished short stories, incomplete stories, fragments and aphorisms written by Kafka between 1917 and 1924. The first English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Martin Secker in 1933. The same translation was published in 1946 by Schocken Books. Contents * Introductory note by Edwin Muir * Longer Stories ** Investigations of a Dog ** The Burrow ** The Great Wall of China ** The Giant Mole * Short Stories and Fables ** The Hunter Gracchus ** The Married Couple ** My Neighbor ** A Common Confusion ** The Bridge ** The Bucket Rider ** A Crossbreed ** The Knock at the Manor Gate ** The City Coat of Arms ** The Silence of the Sirens ** Prometheus ** The Truth about Sancho Panza ** The Problem of Our Laws ** On Pa ...
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Franz Kafka's Diaries
Franz Kafka's Diaries, written in German language between 1910-1923, include casual observations, details of daily life, reflections on philosophical ideas, accounts of dreams, and ideas for stories. Kafka’s diaries offer a detailed view of the writer's thoughts and feelings, as well as some of his most famous and quotable statements. Kafka began keeping the diaries at the age of 27, as an attempt to provoke his stalled creativity, and kept writing in them until 1923, a year before his death. These diaries were in the background all through the composition of Kafka's major works and many of them are discussed and analyzed in detail. The diaries offer an image of a profoundly depressed man, isolated from friends and family, involved in a series of failed relationships, and constantly sick. While this is certainly part of Kafka's character, it is typical for a private journal, not meant for publication, to express more of the writer's anxieties and worries. The humor and light-he ...
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Dearest Father
Dearest may refer to: * ''Dearest'' (2012 film) (''Anata e''), a 2012 Japanese film directed by Yasuo Furuhata * ''Dearest'' (2014 film) (''Qin Ai De''), a 2014 Chinese film directed by Peter Chan * "Dearest" (Ayumi Hamasaki song) * ''Dearest'' (EP), a 2022 EP by N.Flying * "Dearest", a 1959 song by Michael Holliday * "Dearest", a 1971 song by Bee Gees (from the Trafalgar Trafalgar most often refers to: * Battle of Trafalgar (1805), fought near Cape Trafalgar, Spain * Trafalgar Square, a public space and tourist attraction in London, England It may also refer to: Music * ''Trafalgar'' (album), by the Bee Gees Pl ...
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Schocken Books
Schocken Books is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that specializes in Jewish literary works. Originally established in 1931 by Salman Schocken as Schocken Verlag in Berlin, the company later moved to Palestine and then the United States, and was acquired by Random House in 1987. History Schocken Books was founded in 1931 by Schocken Department Store owner Salman Schocken. Schocken has published the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and S. Y. Agnon, among others. After being shut down by the Germans in 1939, Schocken, who immigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1934, founded the Hebrew-language ''Schocken Publishing House'' in Mandatory Palestine. Schocken moved to the United States in 1940. In 1945 he founded the English-language Schocken Books in New York City. In 1987 it was bought up by Random House. Schocken Books continues to publish Jewish literary works. Selected English publications Franz Kafka * ''The Trial'' * '' The Cas ...
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Exact Change
Exact Change is an American independent book publishing company founded in 1989 by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang who, outside of their publishing careers, were musicians associated with Galaxie 500 and Damon and Naomi. The company specialises in re-publishing 19th- and 20th-century avant-garde literature and has published works by John Cage, Salvador Dalí and Denton Welch among many others. Selected publications * ''The Heresiarch & Co.'', ''The Poet Assassinated'' - Guillaume Apollinaire * ''The Adventures of Telemachus'', ''Paris Peasant'' - Louis Aragon * ''Watchfiends and Rack Screams'' - Antonin Artaud * ''Composition in Retrospect'' - John Cage * '' The Hearing Trumpet'' - Leonora Carrington * ''Hebdomeros'' - Giorgio de Chirico * ''Oui'' - Salvador Dalí * ''Give My Regards to Eighth Street'' - Morton Feldman * ''The Death and Letters of Alice James'' - Alice James * ''The Supermale'', ''Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician'' - Alfred Jarry * ''The Blue O ...
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , , ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hans Christian Andersen were all "understood" far too quickly by "scholars". Kierkegaard's theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the Church, the differences between purely ...
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Fear And Trembling
''Fear and Trembling'' (original Danish title: ''Frygt og Bæven'') is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym ''Johannes de silentio'' (Latin for ''John of the Silence''). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." — itself a probable reference to Psalms 55:5, "Fear and trembling came upon me..." Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham during the Binding of Isaac. Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to refuse to comply with God's orders. He resigned himself to the three-and-a-half-day journey and to the loss of his son. "He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eliezer. Who, after all, could understand him, for did not the nature of temptation extract from him a pledge of silence? He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife." Because he kept everything to himself and chose no ...
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Books By Franz Kafka
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a ...
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Books Published Posthumously
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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