Showing results for "thomas mann"

The Buddenbrooks have worked hard to make their name, and the eponymous firm of Johann Buddenbrook is widely known for its trading prowess. But despite trappings like an imposing town house on Meng Street, under the surface the cracks are showing: Johann's first son isn't living up to the status the family desires, and there are more problems to come.Buddenbrooks is a biographical novel spanning over forty years and four generations, and charts the dwindling fortunes of th...

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator'A supremely gifted storyteller' New YorkerThree of the finest stories by a giant of European literature, collected in a beautiful editionThis triptych of stories represents some of the finest work by the great German master, Thomas Mann. From a classic early account of artistic formation, suffused with deep melancholy, to works that explo...

A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores the artist's relation to life.First published in 1912, Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes', and meets a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the a...

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece." -The New Yorker"Doctor 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 protagonis...

**The definitive translation of 'perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' (**New York Times)‘I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?’Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German dynasty as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: ...

Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger tells of a man who belongs nowhere. The son of a Lübeck merchant and a mother with an artistic temperament, Tonio lives between two worlds: drawn to the clean, ordinary life that never quite opens to him, and uneasy among artists whose poses he can't fully trust. The story follows Tonio from schoolroom longing into adulthood, where his gifts become both his vocation and his distance from other people. He becomes a writer — successful, observant, and solitary — wa...

'impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and yet sacred, still honourable, even here: "I love you!"' This volume contains a generous selection of the short fiction Thomas Mann published in the years 1897 to 1912, after which he turned to larger-scale projects. The acknowledged classic among the early shorter fiction is the novella Death in Venice, in which Mann develops a lyrical style and a range of mythological allusions, through the forbidden love of a mid...

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’It is summer time in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans h...

To unlock his full creative potential, Adrian Leverkühn makes a lethal pact with nature and intentionally contracts syphilis.A brilliant young composer, Adrian believes that the disease-induced madness will fuel his genius. But while his music reaches new heights, his mind and morality begin to unravel. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall.

Death in Venice, novella by Thomas Mann, published in German as Der Tod in Venedig in 1912. A symbol-laden story of aestheticism and decadence, Mann’s best-known novella exemplifies the author’s regard for Sigmund Freud’s writings on the unconscious. Gustav von Aschenbach is a revered author whose work is known for its discipline and formal perfection.

Published in 1901, Thomas Mann's *Buddenbrooks* traces four generations of a prosperous Lübeck merchant family whose gradual economic, social, and spiritual decline becomes a comprehensive portrait of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Combining the expansive architecture of the family chronicle with finely observed realism, psychological analysis, and a subtly ironic narrative voice, the novel examines the tensions between commercial duty, artistic sensibility, erotic desire, and histo...

An atmospheric story of obsession and inner conflict set in the oppressive heat of a Venetian summer, Death in Venice is considered to be one of Thomas Mann’s greatest works.Seized by the urge to travel, revered German writer Gustav von Aschenbach books a stay in a hotel on Venice’s Lido. There, in the oppressive summer heat, he becomes intoxicated by the beauty of a young Polish boy who is on holiday with his family. As Aschenbach's struggle between disci...