Thomas Mann

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods A 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. “A remarkable achievement . . . In Woods’s sparkling translation, the reader encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom, and tone to the original.”—New York Times Book Review “Wonderfully fresh and elegant . . . Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.”—Los Angeles TimesBuddenbrooks, 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 of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all.Paperback731 pagesRandom House/Vintage, 1994Originally Published in 19015.1 x 1.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679752608Historical Fiction

Buddenbrooks

By Thomas MannTranslated by Lesley Chamberlain A sumptuous new translation of the sublime novella of desire, obsession, and one man’s downfall; another classic from the author of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. “Probably the greatest of modern German novelists.” ―The New York Times One of the pre-eminent works of modern European literature, this enthralling story of desire, beauty and infatuation follows the erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach’s descent into obsession. Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As he lingers on at the hotel, Aschenbach falls into an ever-deeper infatuation with the youth, whose curled blond hair and porcelain face fill him with rapture, and even seem to cure his stubborn writer’s block. Ignoring whispered warnings of a cholera outbreak in Venice, Aschenbach stays at the hotel and follows Tadzio with increasing obsession, his mind swirling with mad desire. Classical in structure yet roiled by disturbing passion, Death in Venice is an enormously powerful story of one man’s undoing. Full of coiled tension and vivid inner conflict, it is one of Thomas Mann’s greatest masterpieces, and appears here in a lively new translation by Lesley Chamberlain. Paperback112 pagesPushkin Press Classics, 20265.09 x 0.36 x 7.77 inchesISBN 9781805332688Literary Classics, Fiction

Death in Venice

By Thomas Mann One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella Death in Venice embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann's handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German writer, torn by his passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, resulted in a work of great psychological intensity and tragic power. It is presented here in an excellent new translation with extensive commentary on many facets of the story. Paperback80 pagesDover Thrift Editions, 1995Originally Published in 19125.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780486287140Fiction

Death in Venice (Dover Thrift Editions)

By Thomas Mann “A classic novella about one man’s infatuation with a young boy’s ideal beauty as cholera sweeps through the canals of Venice, emptying the hotels and quieting the streets.” —Jillian Kravatz, Boston Magazine A "brilliant . . . perfectly nuanced translation" (The Boston Globe) of Thomas Mann's greatest short works Featuring 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 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. Paperback384 pagesPenguin Classics, 1999Originally Published in 19125 x 7.7 inchesISBN 9780141181738German Literature

Death in Venice and Other Tales

By Thomas Mann Translated by John E. Woods "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 Republic Thomas 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. Paperback534 pagesRandom House/Vintage, 1999Originally Published in 19475.3 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780375701160Fiction

Doctor Faustus

By Thomas MannIntroduction by Nina Pelikan Straus Translated by Willard R. Trask "In The Black Swan Thomas Mann returns to the compact dimensions and to the subject matter of Death in Venice (transposed into heterosexual terms)—the infatuation of an aging person for a young one. . . . A provocative addition to Mann's writings."—C. J. Rolo, Atlantic MonthlyThomas Mann's bold and disturbing novella, written in 1952, is the feminine counterpart of his masterpiece Death in Venice. Written from the point of view of a woman in what we might now call mid-life crisis, The Black Swan evinces Mann's mastery of psychological analysis and his compelling interest in the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in human behavior. It is startlingly relevant to current discussions of the politics of the body, male inscriptions of the feminine, and discourse about and of women. The new introduction places this dramatic novella in the context of contemporary feminist and literary concerns, bringing it to the attention of a new generation of readers.Paperback155 pagesCalifornia University Press, 1990Originally Published in 19535.2 x 0.4 x 7.3 inchesISBN 9780520070097Psychological Fiction

The Black Swan

By Thomas Mann Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter Introduction by Russell A. Berman "A small masterpiece. . . . It is a triumph of art indistinguishable from moral sensibility which makes the miraculous, most incredible part of the story . . . the most convincing."—Stephen Spender, New York Times Book ReviewFirst published in 1951, The Holy Sinner explores a subject that fascinated Thomas Mann to the end of his life—the origins of evil and evil's connection with magic. Here Mann uses a medieval legend about 'the exceeding mercy of God and the birth of the blessed Pope Gregory' as he used the Biblical account of Joseph as the basis for Joseph and His Brothers—illuminating with his ironic sensibility the notion of original sin and transcendence of evil. Paperback 336 pagesUniversity of California Press, 1992Original Published in 19515 x 0.9 x 7.9 inchesISBN 9780520076716Spirituality, Historical Fiction

The Holy Sinner

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods “All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version . . . Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor.” —New York Times Book Review“[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.” —Washington Post Book WorldWith 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.Acclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann’s masterpiece. A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic. Also available in German.Hardcover854 pagesEveryman's Library, 1996Originally Published in 1924ISBN 9781400044214Novel, Fiction

The Magic Mountain

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. Woods "In Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world." —The New York Review of Books"The Magic Mountain taught me that big ideas have vitality, that intellectual life could make for great storytelling, and that the map of an age could be found in the personalities of the people who lived it, lessons that I carried into the writing of history. But the truth is, I have returned again and again to The Magic Mountain because the characters who inhabit it are such delightful company."—The American Scholar"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing."—A. S. Byatt In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelist, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In The Magic Mountain, 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.To this hermetic yet intrigue-ridden world comes Hans Castorp, a "perfectly ordinary" young man who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying seven years. For on the Magic Mountain, Hans will succumb to both the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. 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. Also available in German. Paperback706 pagesVintage International, 1996Originally published in 19245.2 x 1.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679772873Existentialism, Satire, Historical Fiction

By Colm TóibínA New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction“Compelling… This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced…Tóibín has fashioned an epic.”—The Guardian“An intimate portrait of Thomas Mann… In The Magician, Tóibín presents a rare view into the making of serious art and, in the process, shows he is a powerful magician himself.” —Chicago Review of Books The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.Paperback512 pagesScribner, 20226 x 1.4 x 9 inchesISBN 9781476785097Thomas Mann, Historical Fiction

The Magician [Paperback]

By Morten Høi Jensen “A nuanced portrait . . . thoughtful [and] perceptive.” —Kirkus Reviews “The Master of Contradictions is many things: a biography of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a history of the Weimar Republic, and a story about one reader’s relationship to the most beguiling novel of the twentieth century. Morten Høi Jensen writes from a place of profound feeling and deep erudition. He is the perfect guide to the novel’s intricate, enchanted world; I did not want to stop exploring it with him.” —Merve Emre, contributing writer, New Yorker The arresting story of how Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain as a defeated Germany descended into political chaos Like many writers of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) welcomed the outbreak of the First World War. He viewed it as a spiritual necessity, a chance to reassert German cultural dominance over Western ideas of democracy and enlightenment. Then, in 1924, he published The Magic Mountain, a massive novel that culminates in the slaughter of war and foreshadows the Nazi terror to come. One of the central achievements of modernism, The Magic Mountain bears testimony to its author’s dramatic political reorientation as a defender of democracy. This poignant book is a biography of Mann’s great novel—its evolution from a short story into a two-volume masterpiece and one of the bestselling novels of the Weimar era. Deftly weaving together elements of biography, history, and literary criticism, Morten Høi Jensen reveals how writing The Magic Mountain against a backdrop of world war, revolution, hyperinflation, and rising right-wing terror moved Mann to embrace the democratic and humanistic ideas he once scorned. One hundred years after The Magic Mountain was first published, at a time when democratic ideas are again under threat, Jensen reveals the universality and timeliness of Mann’s great novel—its still-resonant debates over democracy and tyranny, time and place, illness and death. Hardcover248 Pages Yale University Press, 2025 5.50 x 8.50 inches ISBN 9780300233742History

The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain"

By Thomas MannTranslated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann Afterword by Michael Wood "To present the foundation of law for half the world is no simple task. The Tables of the Law is a historical title following Moses as he is tasked by God to present the ten commandments, providing a human and much different insight on the role of Moses as the Prophet of God. Expertly translated, The Tables of the Law is a solid addition to any literary fiction collection."—Midwest Book Review"Beautiful…one of the best short novels he has written." —New York Times Book Review"Can rank with the best of Mann's writing" —Boston Globe "His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and holiness—the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure." Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law, the Nobel Prize winner's retelling of the prophet's life. Invited in 1943 to write this story as a defense of the Decalogue, Mann reveals how strange and forbidding Moses' task was. As "the Lawgiver"—endowed with the wrists and hands of a stonemason—engraves the tablets, so he hews the souls of his people: "Into the stone of the mountain I carved the ABC of human behavior,but it shall also be carved into your flesh and blood, Israel . . ." Mann's tale of the ethical founding and molding of a people sharply rebukes the Nazis for their intended destruction of the moral code set down in the Ten Commandments. But does his famous irony and authorial license mock or enhance the Biblical account of the shaping of the Jewish people? You know the Bible story. Now read Mann's version—it will grip you anew. Paperback120 pagesPaul Dry Books, 2010Originally published in 1944ISBN 9781589880573 Spirituality, Historical Fiction

The Tables of the Law

By Ehrhard Bahr “Each chapter in Bahr's book is capable of standing alone, but the author also invokes ideas, incidents and personalities in each chapter that strike sparks off the material in other chapters. . . . Weimar on the Pacific is a brilliant tour de force of intellectual history and cultural criticism, both audacious and accomplished.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“This is a wonderful book. . . . The writing is distinguished by a profound knowledge of its many subjects, an infectious interest, and a sharp eye for telling details, all of which bring the material alive.”—Modern Language Review“This important book--of meticulous and impressive research, refined analysis, and lucid organization and writing--is demanding, a challenge to the author’s peers and yet rewarding also for the generally educated reader.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles’s influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through. Paperback382 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20085.9 x 1 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520257955German History, Literature

Shop at Neue Thomas Mann

Buddenbrooks

Death in Venice

Death in Venice (Dover Thrift Editions)

Death in Venice and Other Tales

Doctor Faustus

The Black Swan

The Holy Sinner

The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain

The Magician [Paperback]

The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain"

The Tables of the Law

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Thomas Mann