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Thomas Mann - Damion Searls & Thomas Mann

By Damion Searls & Thomas Mann

Release Date: 2023-02-28

Genre: Short Stories

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Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023

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.

Thomas Mann - Damion Searls & Thomas Mann

By Damion Searls & Thomas Mann

Release Date: 2023-02-28

Genre: Short Stories

(0 ratings)
Read Download
Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023

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.

More by Damion Searls & Thomas Mann

Eva Braun

Septology

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

The Other Name

The Inkblots

A Shining

Demian

Morning and Evening

Thomas Mann

Young Once

Anniversaries

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

A New Name: Septology VI-VII

My Men

I is Another

Kippenberger

Anti-Education

Amsterdam Stories

Sundays in August

The Third Reich of Dreams

Letters to a Young Poet

Aliss at the Fire

Vaim

Marshlands

Tun-huang

A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories

Trees

Bright Magic

Overstaying

The Philosophy of Translation

Bambi

A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture

In the Land of the Cyclops

Anniversaries, Volume 1

Anniversaries, Volume 2

Melancholy I & II

Analog Days

Thank You for Not Reading

Rorschach

Im Auge des Betrachters

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