A remarkable achievement . . . In Woods s sparkling translation, the reader encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom, and tone to the original. NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Wonderfully fresh and elegant . . . Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann s fictional universe. LOS ANGELES TIMES From the Hardcover edition."

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books -- most notably Arno Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize; Patrick Suskind's Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Suskind's The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story; Doris Dorrie's Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing and What Do You Want from Me?; and Libuse Monikova's The Facade. Mr. Woods lives in San Diego and is currently at work on a translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. From the Hardcover edition.