Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories

Thomas Mann

Oct 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by James Anderson Foster

About this audiobook

Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023 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.

About the author

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was a novelist, critic, and essayist who received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Germany, he fled to Switzerland and then to California after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, returning to Switzerland in 1952. His most influential works include Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

James Anderson Foster has narrated audiobooks for a variety of publishers, across nearly all genres-both fiction and nonfiction. In 2015, he was a finalist in three categories for the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Voice Arts Awards (Mystery, Science Fiction, and Fantasy).

Damion Searls, the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and Cullman Center fellowships, has translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, and six Nobel Prize winners, as well as three books by Rainer Maria Rilke.