Joseph and His Brothers: The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, Joseph the Provider

This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winners 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 partsThe Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provideras a unified narrative, a mythological novel of Josephs 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 Manns achievement, revealing the novels exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.