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. Often thought to be a forbidding writer—“the starched collar,” as Bertolt Brecht called him—Thomas Mann was a lively and even hilarious storyteller with heartbreaking sympathy for his characters. In these fresh renderings, award-winning translator Damion Searls recovers this underappreciated aspect of Mann’s genius. The headliner of this volume, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (formerly known as “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” and now in its first new translation since 1936), is Mann’s tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the “Bigs” and “Littles” of the Cornelius family as they adapt to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is the famous schoolboy chapter from Buddenbrooks—a sensation when it first published; “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull,” included as a comic counterpart to “Death in Venice,” as Mann originally intended; and a short, savage early story, “Louisey.” Together, these coruscating translations recast for a new generation Mann’s incisive sense of the comedy amid life’s tragedies.