Paul Thomas Mann was a German writer and one of the most important storytellers of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
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.
Sparkling new translations illuminate the humor and poignancy of Mann's best stories, including his masterpiece, newly translated into English for the first time in nearly a century. Often seen as a dry and forbidding writer, Mann's fiction is actually lively, humane, and sometimes hilarious. Award-winning translator Damion Searls sheds light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann's genius through fresh renderings of his short works. The centerpiece, "Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow," is a subtle masterpiece that reveals the emotional significance of everyday life, portraying the bourgeois Cornelius family as they navigate straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. The volume also features an excerpt from Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, which was a sensation upon its release. While "Death in Venice" is Mann's most famous story, it was originally intended to be paired with a comedic tale, included here as "Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull." Additionally, "Louisey," a story of sexual humiliation, offers insight into Mann's lifelong ambivalence about the power of art. This collection is both revelatory and transformative, showcasing the depth and range of Mann's literary brilliance.
Famous for his novels, Thomas Mann is more accessible through the shorter fictions which span his entire career. The most famous of these stories is one of the earliest. Death in Venice was made into the celebrated Visconti film, but all his mature preoccupations are present in this story: the need for a sense of meaning in existence, the relationship between life and art, the central role of sexual energy and the strange forms it can take, the place of death and disease, the importance of work, the individual's complex relations with his society and the dominant culture. These themes are developed in a series of brilliant stories, may of them very short and displaying the author's talent for macabre comedy. Dr Faustus and Buddenbrooks are already available in Everyman
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.
This classic novella, writer by Thomas Mann in exile during the Second World War, recounts the early life of Moses. In Mann's ironic and telling style, this most dramatic and significant story in the Hebrew Bible takes on a new (and at times witty) life and meaning. It represents Mann's art at its best.
Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus , during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write.A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverkühn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius—years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness.A scathing allegory of Germany’s renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth. Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter
This is an intellectual drama of the forces which play upon modern man. Its theatre is a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains - a community organized with exclusive reference to ill-health.
s/t: The correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann 1910-55 The letters present two great XX century Nobel Prize writers grieving for the ruined world. In the 1930s and 1940s, they rail against the stupidity of war and the cowardice of diplomats, against the social savagery of the Nazis, against the blind forces of abstraction and nationalism. They brood about the fate of Germany and of Europe after the last shots have been fired. They have lived through a time of extraordinary horror and yet they have not surrendered to despair or nihilism. Reading the letters, the reader will feel like some privileged guest in a special room, sitting off to the side somewhere, listening while these men talk.
A new translation of a 1948 novel by a German writer based on the Faust legend. The protagonist is Adrian Leverkuhn, a musical genius who trades his body and soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of triumph as the world's greatest composer
