An extraordinary collection of stories from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the title story, one of Mann's most political, explores the rise of facism by way of a mysterious magician in a small Italian vollage. In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Thomas Mann uses settings as diverse as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East to explore a theme which always preoccupied him: the two faces of things. Thus, in "A Man and His Dog" and "Disorder and Early Sorrow," small domestic tempests become symbolic of the discordant muddle of humanity. In "The Transposed Heads" and "The Tables of Law" the demands of the intellect clash with the desires of physiology -- an idea developed more fully in "The Black Swan," where body and spirit are tragically out of harmony. Written between 1918 and 1953, these stories offer us both an insight into Mann's development of thought and also some impressive literature from these interesting times.