Thomas Mann,
New Selected Stories
Including “Death in Venice” and Mann’s greatest story, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow”
Liveright, 2023
“Searls infuses the prose of Nobel laureate Mann with momentum and energy in this excellent collection.” — Publishers Weekly
“A profound new translation… Although it contains a magnificent rendition of his classic novella Death in Venice,… the greatest achievement of this book may very well be recontextualizing Mann within the jumbled, pan-continental tradition he shares with other expatriate writers like Joyce and Nabokov.” — vulture.com, “New Books You Should Read”
“Superb translations of Mann’s most essential short works… Searls is meticulous in his attention to German-language nuance but intuitive in channeling the tensions and rhythms of his source material.”
— Booklist, starred review
“A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author… Fresh, revealing… Searls [brings] Mann’s decades-old prose to life without anachronism or false breeziness.” — Kirkus, starred review
Publisher / IndieBound / Amazon
Blurbs
“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
“Searls’s selections of this funny, ironic, exceptionally readable 20th-century writer’s work are as inspired as his engaging and lucid translations: here we have the slow-burning torment and humiliation of ‘Louisey,’ the charming irony of ‘Confessions of a Con Artist, By Felix Krull,’ the startling emotional acuity of ‘A Day in the Life of Hanno Buddenbrook,’ and the great rediscovery, ‘Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow,’ which condenses a novel’s worth of empathy, family conflict, and fine-grained observation into a riveting story less than forty pages long. Towering above all is ‘Death in Venice’—the extraordinary pandemic tale, refreshed and haunting in its best-ever translation. I’ve spent years waiting for the Mannaissance—the publication of New Selected Stories will, at last, bring it into being.”
— Mark Krotov, coeditor, n+1