This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event.
Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur.
Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothers that is worthy of Mann’s achievement, revealing the novel’s exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.
Author
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was from Germany. At the age of 25, he published his first novel, Buddenbrooks. In 1924, The Magic Mountain was published, and five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948).
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