"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: ...

The Complete Novels of Thomas Mann gathers the major works of one of twentieth-century Europe's most searching novelists, tracing a career that moves from the dynastic realism of Buddenbrooks through the ironic social comedy of Royal Highness, the philosophical plenitude of The Magic Mountain, and the mythic expansiveness of Joseph and His Brothers. It also includes the historical and artistic meditations of Lotte in Weimar and Doctor Faustus, as well as the deliberately playful narratives...

**The definitive translation of 'Arguably the great German novel' (**New York Times)‘This man is mad. Of that there can no longer be any doubt, and it is pitiable that no one representing psychiatric science is part of our circle’In May 1943 a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a once-brilliant composer and the flower of German culture. He recalls how, consumed by over-reaching...

The Complete Works of Thomas Mann presents the expansive achievement of one of twentieth-century literature's defining stylists. Across novels, novellas, essays, speeches, and other writings, Mann examines the tensions between art and bourgeois society, intellect and instinct, disease and vitality, private desire and public responsibility. His famously measured prose—ironic, ceremonious, psychologically acute, and richly allusive—creates an intricate literary world in which individual dest...

Thomas Mann's *Death in Venice* (1912) follows Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated, disciplined writer who travels to Venice seeking renewal and becomes enthralled by the beautiful adolescent Tadzio. Against the city's decaying splendor and concealed cholera epidemic, Mann examines artistic idealism, erotic obsession, mortality, and the instability of cultivated self-control. The novella's exquisitely controlled prose, symbolic imagery, ironic distance, and recurring opposition between Apo...

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) follows Hans Castorp, a young Hamburg engineer who visits his cousin at a Swiss sanatorium and gradually becomes absorbed into its diseased, intellectually charged society. What begins as a three-week stay expands into seven years, as tuberculosis, erotic fascination, and philosophical debate suspend ordinary time. Mann's expansive, ironic narrative combines psychological realism with allegory, essayistic digression, and a carefully controlled play b...

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...

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...

Published in 1909, Thomas Mann's *Royal Highness* is a richly ironic Künstlerroman of aristocratic self-discovery disguised as a modern fairy tale. Klaus Heinrich, the second son of a minor German grand duke, performs the ceremonial duties of royalty while feeling increasingly estranged from ordinary human life. His marriage to Imma Spoelmann, the intelligent and unconventional daughter of an immensely wealthy American industrialist, brings together hereditary privilege and capitalist mode...

Thomas Mann: Short Stories & Novellas gathers the shorter fiction in which Mann compresses the grand concerns of his novels—art and eroticism, illness and vitality, bourgeois order and inner rebellion—into forms of remarkable precision. From the Künstlernovelle's self-conscious meditation on artistic identity to the psychologically charged tragedy of "Death in Venice," these works display Mann's characteristic fusion of irony, symbolic patterning, philosophical reflection, and sensuous des...

Thomas Mann's *Doctor Faustus* (1947) is a complex Künstlerroman and national allegory centered on Adrian Leverkühn, a brilliant composer who exchanges his soul for artistic genius and ultimately pays for it with madness and death. Narrated by his humanist friend Serenus Zeitblom, the novel interweaves biography, theological speculation, musical theory, and historical commentary, drawing on the Faust legend, Nietzschean thought, and the technical innovations of modernist composition. Lever...