Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State. Mann's most Dostoevskyan novel should, in this splendid new version, speak more powerfully than ever to contemporary readers. Woods's vigorous translation works brilliantly on two counts: It catches both the logic and the music of Mann's intricate mandarin sentences (if one reads closely, the rewards are great) and it gives the novel's narrator (``Adrian's intimate from his hometown'') a truly distinctive voice, making him more of an involved character than a rhetorical device. A work written in old age and suffused with Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism, Doctor Faustus unrelentingly details the rise and fall of Adrian LeverkÅhn, a gifted musician (modeled, as Mann admitted, on modernist innovator Arnold Schoenberg) who effectively sells his soul to the devil for a generation of renown as the greatest living composer. The modest Thomas Mann boom, begun with the recent publication (by New Directions) of his early stories, continues with this fine new English translation of the author's last great novel, first published in 1948.

Doctor faustus by thomas mann