I read Mario and the Magician and Other Stories by Thomas Mann

The other stories here were "A Man and His Dog" (1918), "Disorder and Early Sorrow" (1925), "The Transposed Heads" (1940), "The Tables of the Law" (1944), and "The Black Swan" (1953). I'm typically not much of a short story reader but I do really love Thomas Mann and also "Mario and the Magician" is an early fictional depiction of hypnosis, so it's relevant to my research for my next novel lol... Anyways these are all more novella-length. I was surprised how much I got into them even though the basic subject matter of most of them... dogs? A pastiche of early translations of Indian myths? The book of Exodus??? ... were things that I would typically say are almost certainly uninteresting. But no, I do just really like the way he writes about the experience of philosophy and thought alongside daily life, internal contradictions, embarrassing impulses, etc, no matter what his sensibility is put towards. "The Tables of the Law" surprised me; I'm familiar with "realist" takes on bible stories and often find them even more tediously cheesy than the original text. But this one introduced a perverse and very human cynicism and self interest, to Moses, but also to God Himself, that broke through my initial resistance to the topic. "The Black Swan" is also notable for having a scene where I had to dog ear the corner of the page for it being so horny. I think people really sell short how weird and also funny Thomas Mann is, this made me want to go in on my long-threatened The Magic Mountain reread soon.