"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 oftenbeen 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...

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

Four novellas about relationships at home and abroad are set in different historical periods and explore the experiences of such protagonists as an American grad student who escapes to Italy after a compromising love affair.