Disorder and Early Sorrow (German: Unordnung und frühes Leid) is a 1925 novella written by Thomas Mann.

As an individual book, it was published in an English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter in 1929[3] and in one by Herman George Scheffauer in 1930.

I think it belongs up there with James Joyce's 'The Dead' and anything you want to name by Gallant or Munro or Chekov at the very top of the canon of short fiction, but it is never, to my knowledge, singled out as such.

The family is divided up on the basis of chronology, foreshadowing a central theme of the work, which is the interplay between different generations at a time of dislocating social and economic change.

A West German film adaptation Disorder and Early Torment [de] was released in 1977, directed by Franz Seitz.