Thomas Mann
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 289
Language
English
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Description
A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. 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...
Author
Language
English
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Description
Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella written by the German author Thomas Mann published in 1912. The work presents a great writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth.
Tadzio, the boy in the story, is the nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and is based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911.
As the story opens, he is strolling...
3) Buddenbrooks
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published in Germany in 1901 and translated into English in 1924, Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" is the story of the decline of a wealthy German family over four generations which takes place in the years 1835 to 1877. Mann began writing the novel, his first, when he was only twenty-two years old and based much of his critically acclaimed work on the story of his own family and their peers. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929...
Author
Language
English
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Description
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" - illuminating the notion of original sin and transcendence of evil.
Author
Series
Joseph und seine Bruder volume III
Language
English
Formats
Description
Thomas Mann regarded his monumental re-telling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus, telling of Joseph's fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt.
As Joseph is saved from the well and sold to Egypt, he adopts a new name, Osarseph, replacing the Jo- element with a reference to Osiris to indicate that he is now in the underworld. This change of name to account for changing circumstances encourages Amenhotep to change his own...
Author
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English
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Description
"When World War I broke out the author of "Buddenbrooks" was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...
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Series
Language
English
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Description
The Nobel Prize—winning author's masterful novella of eros and obsession, presented alongside other short works of lyrical beauty and psychological depth.
In Thomas Mann's immortal novella A Death in Venice, renowned author Gustave Aschenbach faces both middle age and a severe case of writer's block. He resolves to go on holiday in search of inspiration, only to find himself awestruck by the classical beauty of a fourteen-year-old boy. Submitting...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This collection features the world masterpiece Death in Venice, with its controversial passages now restored. There is fresh relevance in the story of an aging writer's uncontrollable and humiliating passion, and the other poignant tales included here. These works subtly explore the great themes of Mann's fiction - his mythic fascination with sexual inhibition and artistic creativity.