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Published Feb 2023
272 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Sparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann's 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 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.
Black-and-white frontispiece
"A fresh, revealing translation of some of the German writer's now-canonical stories. In this vigorous new version, Searls emphasizes aspects of Mann's life and work that have not been well aired outside of the scholarly literature...A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Searls infuses the prose of Nobel laureate Mann (1875–1955) with momentum and energy in this excellent collection. English-language readers will find the humor and digressive appeal of Mann's prose enhanced...Scholars as well as those new to Mann will find much to appreciate in Searls's stimulating approach." - Publishers Weekly
"Searls' superb translations of Mann's most essential short works emphasize moments of despair and levity, breathing fresh humanity into the stories of the famously solemn German literary giant... Searls is meticulous in his attention to German-language nuance but intuitive in channeling the tensions and rhythms of his source material." - Booklist
"I have long loved Thomas Mann's subtlety, erudition, and elegant mind, but it wasn't until reading these newly translated stories that I picked up the range of the author's irony and humor. The art of translation seems to me the most delicate and precise of literary arts, and Damion Searls stands at the very apex of translators into English." - Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
"Damion Searls has produced the perfect Mann translation; the author's erudition and aesthetic sensibility are mutually enhanced instead of one being sacrificed for the other. Mann has never been more readable in English, and the English reader never more aware of the shining beauty of the source." - Anton Hur, translator
"Although Mann's stories are more than a century old, Damion Searls's new translations capture the writer's sly humor and warmth, making these short masterpieces feel wholly modern. Readers who know Mann will see him anew; for those who haven't read him yet, this collection is a superb introduction to one of the greats." - Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
This information about Thomas Mann was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas Mann, a member of a Hanseatic family with deep roots in Lübeck, was arguably Germany's most famous twentieth-century writer. In 1929, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Damion Searls is a prize-winning translator of fifty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch. Liveright published his translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet in 2020.
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