Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023 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 often been 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 r