Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now 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 its 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.

A classic of modern literature: Buddenbrooks is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. With an introduction by T. J. Reed, and translated by John E. Woods. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor. First published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles in its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim. Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Жемчужина творческого наследия Томаса Манна. Едва ли не лучший роман в жанре "семейной саги" немецкоязычной прозы. История взлета и падения богатой и могущественной семьи Будденброк, на первый взгляд словно воплощающей в себе идеал германских добродетелей. История трех поколений представителей этого клана - от властного и безжалостного патриарха до его внуков, уже подверженных всем порокам и слабостям интеллектуалов. История любви и предательств, вражды и интриг, борьбы и зависти, исступленной страсти - и жгучей ненависти...

Sparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann’s best stories―including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century. A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer―“the starched collar,” as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann’s genius. The headliner of this volume, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (in its first new translation since 1936)―a subtle masterpiece that reveals the profound emotional significance of everyday life―is Mann’s tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the “Bigs” and “Littles” of the bourgeois Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt from Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks ―a sensation when it was first published. “Death in Venice” (also included in this volume) is Mann’s most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a diptych with another, comic story―included here as “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull.” “Louisey”―a tale of sexual humiliation that gives a first glimpse of Mann’s lifelong ambivalence about the power of art―rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection. black-and-white frontispiece

This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas 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. --front flap

The Buddenbrook clan is everything you’d expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family – wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. In this, Mann’s first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.

Wenn irgendwann einmal ein Preis für den besten Buchtitel vergeben werden sollte, würde für mich Thomas Manns Zauberberg ganz oben auf die Liste gehören. Noch bevor ich das Buch gelesen hatte, weckte schon das Wort Neugier auf eine magische Welt. Nun, wer den Zauberberg kennt, weiß, daß dies kein Buch von fremden Feenwelten ist, und doch waltet hier eindeutig Magie. Die erste magische Leistung besteht darin, eine Handlung, die in einem Satz zusammengefaßt werden kann, auf 1.000 Seiten zu packen: Der junge Hamburger Hans Castorp, Sproß einer Patrizierfamilie lebt bis zum Ausbruch des ersten Weltkriegs sieben Jahre in einem Schweizer Luxussanatorium für Lungenkranke, ohne selbst krank zu sein. Die zweite magische Leistung ist Thomas Manns Sprache, die auch in tausend Jahren nichts von ihrer Kraft verloren haben wird. Die dritte magische Leistung ist die Behandlung der Figuren, die alle mehr mehr sind als bloße Protagonisten. Sie sind Exponate ihrer Zeit, jede für sich repräsentiert einen Teil geistigen Lebens in einer Ära, deren Ende sich vollzog während Thomas Mann am Zauberberg saß und schrieb. Die vierte magische Leistung schließlich, die zauberbergigste vielleicht, ist das Spiel mit dem Leser. Oder besser: das Spiel mit der Geschwindigkeit des Lesers. Thomas Mann erreicht, daß dem Leser zehn Minuten Lesen wie eine halbe Stunde Lesen vorkommen, und zwar genau dann, wenn Hans Castorp denkt, er habe eine halbe Stunde geträumt. Wie sich herausstellt, waren es zehn Minuten. Elf Jahre hat Thomas Mann an dem Buch geschrieben, das doch eigentlich nur eine Weiterführung des Themas aus Tod in Venedig sein sollte. Es wurde einer der meist gelesenen deutschen Romane. Zu recht. --Bettina Albert

Thomas Mann selbst bezeichnete den ›Tod in Venedig‹ als eine »Novelle gewagten, wenn nicht unmöglichen Gegenstandes« und bezieht sich dabei auf den plötzlichen »Einbruch der Leidenschaft« in das Leben eins homoerotisch veranlagten Menschen. Der nicht mehr junge Schriftsteller Gustav Aschenbach – mit den Gesichtszügen Gustav Mahlers – entdeckt für sich am Lido des schwülwarmen Venedig die Gestalt des schönen Knaben Tadzio, strebt in seinen Gedanken zu ihm und steigert sich in eine unerfüllbare Liebe, deren Opfer er schließlich wird. In der Textfassung der Großen kommentierten Frankfurter Ausgabe (GKFA).

The novella, 'The Transposed Heads' is Thomas Mann's philosophical version of an Indian legend about the conflict between mind and body. In a twinned paroxysm, two friends, the intellectual Shridaman and the earthy Nanda, behead themselves. Magically, their severed heads are restored - but to the wrong body, and Shridaman's wife, Sita, is unable to decide which combination represents her real husband. The story is further complicated by the fact that Sita happens to be in love with both men. Mann retells the tale from a metaphysical, yet ironic viewpoint. He strongly reacts to the axiomatic assumption that there is a dichotomy between spirit and life, mind and body. He, like many 20th century writers felt the necessity of reshuffling the present scale of values and meanings by constantly juxtaposing them with older ones.

A title in the Bristol Classical Press German Texts series, in German with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. Thomas Mann (1875-1955), was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and "Tonio Kroger" occupies a central position in his spiritual and artistic development. A study of youth, it draws together many strands of his life and the duality of his parentage; his abhorrence of discipline; and the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner on his early phase of writing.

Primera obra maestra del autor, Los Buddenbrook fue escrita tras su período de formación en Italia. En ella narra magistralmente la historia de las sucesivas generaciones de una familia de la alta burguesía de Lübeck, su ciudad natal, hasta la muerte del último heredero en 1876; desde el más brillante esplendor hasta la más desgarradora decadencia.

Thomas Mann'ın 1940'ta Stockholm'de yayımladığı Değişen Kafalar, XII. yüzyıldan kalma bir Hint efsanesine değişik bir açıdan yaklaşıyor. Şridaman ile Nanda, farklı kastlardan gelmelerine, zihnen ve fiziki olarak birbirlerinden çok farklı olmalarına rağmen, ayrılmaz iki dosttur. Şridaman, Brahman soyuna dayanan tüccar bir aileye mensup narin yüzlü, çelimsizdir; Nanda ise demircilik yapan, inek güden güçlü ve yakışıklı bir gençtir. Birbirlerini tamamlayan bu iki gencin dostluğu, güzel Sita'yla karşılaşmalarıyla yeni bir boyut kazanır. Şridaman ve Sita evlenir. Ancak Sita'nın, seçimiyle ilgili pişmanlıkları vardır. Hayatları, Sita'nın ailesine birlikte yaptıkları bir yolculukta geçen olaylarla çok ilginç bir biçimde yön değiştirir. Thomas Mann, Değişen Kafalar ile çok nadir bir olaya, kültürlerarası etkileşime neden olur. Hint efsanesinden yola çıkan Mann'ın romanı, Hint oyun yazarı Giris Karnad'ın ödüllü oyunu Hayava­dana'yı esinler. Mann eserinde, kelimenin tam anlamıyla mitolojik bir Hint fantezisi yaratmıştır. Doğu ve Batı, zihin ve beden, dostluk ve aşk, erotizm ve ruhsal uyum gibi motifler üzerine çok şey söyleyen Değişen Kafalar, mitolojik ve fantastik bir öykü.

Hans Castorp, recatosi a trovare un cugino in sanatorio, finisce col restarvi, ammalatosi a sua volta, per sette anni. A contatto con il microcosmo del sanatorio, vero e proprio panorama di tutte le correnti di pensiero, il suo carattere subisce un'evoluzione e un incremento: passa attraverso la malattia, l'amore (la signora Chauchat), il razionalismo e la gioia di vivere (Settembrini), il pessimismo irrazionale (Naphta), senza che nessuna di queste posizioni lo converta. Ma in mezzo a tante forze contrastanti, Castorp trova il suo equilibrio. Scoppia la guerra nel 1914 e Hans viene strappato da questa magica e raffinata atmosfera per essere gettato sui campi di battaglia dove la sua sorte resta incerta, ma immersa in un clima di morte.

El propio Thomas Mann advierte que esta novela trata sobre «la pasión como desequilibrio y degradación». Gustav Aschenbach, «arroyo de cenizas» en alemán, es un escritor maduro que goza de reconocimiento. Llega a Venecia en busca de inspiración, pero también de llenar sus días con reflexiones estéticas en un entorno idílico. En el hotel coincide con Tadzio, un joven de polaco que se encuentra de vacaciones con su familia. El muchacho se convierte en objeto de deseo y adoración; un amor ideal e imposible basado en la contemplación estética y que llevará a Aschenbach a renunciar a todo, incluso a sí mismo.

Il famoso scrittore tedesco Gustav Aschenbach, che ha basato la sua vita e l'intera opera sulla più ostinata fedeltà ai canoni classici dell'estetica e dell'etica, è spinto a Venezia da un misterioso impulso. Nell'attimo in cui balena sulla spiaggia del Lido la spietata bellezza del ragazzo polacco Tadzio, Aschenbach avverte il definitivo segno del destino: l'anelito allo sfacelo. La morte a Venezia (1913), oltre che un romanzo, è una cerimonia.

Featuring his world-famous masterpiece, "Death in Venice," this new collection of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann's stories and novellas reveals his artistic evolution. In this new, widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were cut out of 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. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: "Tonio Kroger," "Gladius Dei," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "The Will for Happiness," "Little Herr Friedmann," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Little Lizzy," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," "The Wunderkind," and "Harsh Hour." All of the stories collected here display Mann's inimitable use of irony, his subtle characterizations, and superb, complex plots.

De jonge Duitser Hans Castorp bezoekt zijn neef in het sanatorium in het Zwitserse Davos. Betoverd door de verleidelijke, zieke Klavdia Chauchat, blijft hij er echter geen drie weken maar zeven jaar. In de hermetische wereld van de Toverberg maakt Castorp een leerproces door, zijn inwijding in het leven, waarbij de humanist Ludovico Settembrini en de sinistere nihilist Leo Naphta strijden om zijn ziel. De Toverberg is een onbetwist hoogtepunt in het oeuvre van Thomas Mann, die op sublieme wijze verbeeldt hoe de Duitse geestelijke elite aan de vooravond van de Eerste Wereldoorlog vluchtte in de ijle wereld van de cultuur.