Stories of Three Decades
by Thomas Mann | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
Stoner
by John Williams | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers | 
White Noise
by Don DeLillo | 
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy |
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens | 
Embers
by Sandor Marai | 
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey |
The Tunnel
by Ernesto Sabato | 
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy | 
Barren Lives
by Graciliano Ramos |
The Life Before Us
by Romain Gary |
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans | 
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding |
They Were Sisters
by Dorothy Whipple | 
The Easter Parade
by Richard Yates |
Thomas Mann's bold and disturbing novella, written in 1952, is the feminine counterpart of his masterpiece Death in Venice. Written from the point of view of a woman in what we might now call mid-life crisis, The Black Swan evinces Mann's mastery of psychological analysis and his compelling interest in the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in human behavior. It is startlingly relevant to current discussions of the politics of the body, male inscriptions of the feminine, and discourse about and of women. The new introduction places this dramatic novella in the context of contemporary feminist and literary concerns, bringing it to the attention of a new generation of readers.