Books by Thomas Mann

Book SynopsisThis superb translation of Death in Venice and six other stories by Thomas Mann is a tour de force, deserving to be the definitive text for English-speaking readers. These seven stories represent Mann’s early writing career and a level of literary quality Mann himself despaired of ever again matching. In these stories he began to grapple with themes that were to recur throughout his work. In Little Herr Friedemann, a character’s carefully structured way of life is suddenly threatened by an unexpected sexual passion. In Gladius Dei, puritanical intellect clashes with beauty. In Tristan, Mann presents an ironic and comic account of the tension between an artist and bourgeois society.All seven of these stories are accomplished and memorable, but it is Death in Venice that truly forms the centerpiece of the collection. The themes that Mann weaves through the shorter pieces come to a climax in this stunning novella, one of the most haun

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Book SynopsisDiscover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic.The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established.Trade ReviewPerhaps the first great novel of the 20th century * New York Times *A simple but magnificent proof of genius. A first novel by a 25-year-old with absolute command of his craft, uncanny knowledge of his world, its past and present, and a daring originality which makes its last pages among the most startlingly moving I know -- Alan Hollinghurst * New York Times *One of the best novels of the 20th century * Guardian *That definitive epic of German family life * Irish Times *His masterpiece * Los Angeles Times *

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Book SynopsisOne day, at dinner, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy who is staying with his family in the same hotel. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city.Trade ReviewThe real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration...A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche * Financial Times *This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece...seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself * The Times *Thomas Mann's story of obsession and spiritual malaise * Observer *What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy...Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature * Independent *Mann's obsessive story explores the complex, haunted relationship between an ageing writer and a beautiful Polish boy * Express *

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Book SynopsisRead Thomas Mann's meditation on the power of literary representation and the tyranny of the writer's imagination. Mann's novel, written some 150 years after Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, follows Lotte Kestner, Goethe's real-life heroine, as she makes a pilgrimage to Weimar to meet the author who courted her forty years before. To her surprise, Lotte is greeted on her arrival as a celebrity and immediately taken up into Goethe's set. Time and place are brilliantly evoked in Mann's novel, but its genius lies in his masterful portrayal of Goethe himself, and of the astonishing influence he exerted on his contemporaries.'A masterpiece' Stefan ZweigTrade ReviewA masterpiece -- Stefan Zweig

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Book SynopsisGustav von Aschenbach, a successful ageing writer, travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city.

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Book SynopsisDiscover Thomas Mann's comic novel of deception and misplaced confidence - back in print for the first time in over twenty years. Waiter by day, man about Paris by night; the young and good looking Felix Krull has created for himself a personality to charm and deceive the world of wealth. When the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal that he can't refuse, the young Felix finds himself on the pathway that will elevate him into the world of riches.'The most astonishing work that Mann ever wrote and also one of the most perfect' Edwin Muir

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Book SynopsisNOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic.With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War.To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

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Book SynopsisA brilliant . . . perfectly nuanced translation (The Boston Globe) of Thomas Mann's greatest short worksA Penguin ClassicFeaturing his world-famous masterpiece, Death in Venice, this collection of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann's stories and novellas reveals his artistic evolution. In a widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were censored from the original English version, Death in Venice tells about a ruinous quest for love and beauty amid degenerating splendor. Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but lonely author, travels to the Queen of the Adriatic in search of an elusive spiritual fulfillment that turns into his erotic doom. Spellbound by a beautiful Polish boy, he finds himself fettered to this hypnotic city of sun-drenched sensuality and eerie physical decay as it gradually succumbs to a secret epidemic. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: Tonio Kroger, Gladius Dei, The Blood of the

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Book SynopsisJohn E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece.  —The New YorkerDoctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods. —The New RepublicThomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man. Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

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Book SynopsisThomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write. A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverkühn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius—years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness. A scathing allegory of Germany’s renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth.   Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter    

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Book SynopsisA Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most o

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Book SynopsisThis European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I.Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.Trade ReviewMagnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love -- Jonathan Coe * Guardian *Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon * Guardian *A monumental writer * Sunday Telegraph *The greatest German novelist of the 20th century * Spectator *Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse. * Independent *

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Book SynopsisA masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.Adrian Leverkühn is a young man destined for success.Trade ReviewArguably the great German novel * New York Times *Perhaps not since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a novelist conveyed so tangibly and exaltedly the mechanism and the aesthetic effect in musical performance * New York Times *The real masterpiece * New York Times *Mann struggled with his own conflicted feelings about Germany and German culture, and in his magisterial Doctor Faustus found the perfect metaphor for what his country had done; it had bargained with the devil, and lost. * The Herald *

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Book SynopsisMann's short stories explore his abiding interest in the split nature of humanity and the discordance of the world it inhabits. In A Man and his Dog', domestic tempests are symbols of the muddle of humanity. In The Black Swan', the demands of intellect clash with physical desires. And in Mario and the Magician' a young family on holiday in Italy encounters a creepy entertainer: Cipolla, a hypnotist with a fascist-like will to control his audience.Written between 1918 and 1953, this collection shows the literary development of one of Germany's most important writers.Trade ReviewThe greatest German novelist of the 20th century * Spectator *A monumental writer * Sunday Telegraph *Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse * Independent *Probably the greatest of modern German novelists * New York Times *

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Book SynopsisThe moving story of Thomas Mann's relationship with his spirited German short-haired pointer. "The life of a dog is a simple and strangely marvelous thing; and that finally may be what sets Bashan and I apart: it is true to the life of a dog."-Gary Amdahl, Ruminator ReviewTrade Review"Termed the finest study of the mind of a dog ever written, a few boldly assert that it is no doubt one of the greatest portrayals of a man's mind. . . . An extremely lovable story. . . . An enchanting classic." * New York Times *"The life of a dog is a simple and strangely marvelous thing; and that finally may be what sets Bashan and I apart: it is true to the life of a dog." * Gary Amdahl, Ruminator Review *

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Book SynopsisA classic, controversial book exploring German culture and identity by the author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, now back in print.When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized inDeath in Venicehad come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation. Thomas took it as an unforgivable stab in the back.The bitter dispute between the brothers would swell into the strange, tortured, brilliant, sometimes perverse literary performance that isReflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a book that Mann worked on and added to throughout the war and that bears an intimate relation to his postwar masterpieceThe Magic Mountain. Wild andungainly though Mann?s reflections can be, they nonetheless constitute, as Mark Lilla demonstrates in a new introduction, a key meditation on the freedom of the artist and the distance between literature and politics.The NYRB Classics edition includes two additional essays by Mann: ?Thoughts in Wartime? (1914), translated by Mark Lilla and Cosima Mattner; and ?On the German Republic? (1922), translated by Lawrence Rainey.

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Book SynopsisThis work by German novelist, Heinrich Mann, is part of the Bristol Classical Press German Texts series. The series is designed to meet the needs of the fast-growing A Level and undergraduate market for texts in the German language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of its literary and cultural context.

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Book SynopsisA portrayal of genius possessed, through the biography of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, narrated by his friend Zeitblom in the years 1943-45, as Germany faces ruin.

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Book SynopsisThomas Mann's first great novel, written at the age of 25, is an epic study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but it goes far beyond his own experience in its sweep and comprehensiveness.

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Book SynopsisFamous for his novels, Thomas Mann is more accessible through the shorter fictions which span his entire career. The most famous of these stories is one of the earliest. Death in Venice was made into the celebrated Visconti film, but all his mature preoccupations are present in this story: the need for a sense of meaning in existence, the relationship between life and art, the central role of sexual energy and the strange forms it can take, the place of death and disease, the importance of work, the individual's complex relations with his society and the dominant culture. These themes are developed in a series of brilliant stories, may of them very short and displaying the author's talent for macabre comedy. Dr Faustus and Buddenbrooks are already available in Everyman

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Book SynopsisThomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts-The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider-as a unified narrative, a "mythological novel" of Joseph's 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 Mann's achievement, revealing the novel's exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.

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