Thomas Mann

- Blurb -

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 Mann' s 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 Mann' s 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 Mann' s first novel, Buddenbrooks-a sensation when it was first published. "Death in Venice" (also included in this volume) is Mann' s 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 Mann' s lifelong ambivalence about the power of art-rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection.