Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories

ISBN: 1324094524

Author: Mann, Thomas

Condition: New

Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023Sparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Manns best stories-including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century. A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-the starched collar, as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Manns genius.The headliner of this volume, Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow (in its first new translation since 1936)-a subtle masterpiece that reveals the profound emotional significance of everyday life-is Manns tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the Bigs and Littles of the bourgeois Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt from Manns first novel, Buddenbrooks-a sensation when it was first published. Death in Venice (also included in this volume) is Manns most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a diptych with another, comic story-included here as Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull. Louisey-a tale of sexual humiliation that gives a first glimpse of Manns lifelong ambivalence about the power of art-rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection. black-and-white frontispiece