Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories -- Thomas Mann

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.<br /><br /> 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, <em>Buddenbrooks</em>--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.<br><br><b>Author:</b> Thomas Mann<br><b>Publisher:</b> Liveright Publishing Corporation<br><b>Published:</b> 04/09/2024<br><b>Pages:</b> 272<br><b>Binding Type: