Mario and the Magician: & other stories

(Paperback)

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An extraordinary collection of stories from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature - the title story, one of Mann's most political, explores the rise of facism by way of a mysterious magician in a small Italian village Mann's short stories explore his abiding interest in the split nature of humanity and the discordance of the world it inhabits. In 'A Man and his Dog', domestic tempests are symbols of the muddle of humanity. In 'The Black Swan', the demands of intellect clash with physical desires. And in 'Mario and the Magician' a young family on holiday in Italy encounters a creepy entertainer- Cipolla, a hypnotist with a fascist-like will to control his audience. Written between 1918 and 1953, this collection shows the literary development of one of Germany's most important writers.

Reviews

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century * Spectator *
A monumental writer * Sunday Telegraph *
Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse * Independent *
Probably the greatest of modern German novelists * New York Times *

Author Bio

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it has sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.