Thomas Mann Boeken

Tijdsbeeld van Europa vóór de Eerste Wereldoorlog, met als hoofdpersoon een zoon uit een Noordduitse koopmansfamilie die, op bezoek in een Zwitsers sanatorium, daar als het ware betoverd door de atmosfeer, zeven jaar blijft.

Gefingeerde biografie van een naar Schönberg gemodelleerde componist wiens genialiteit zich vanwege een pakt met de duivel uiteindelijk tegen hem keert.

Een wat oudere schrijver raakt tijdens een verblijf in Venetië in de ban van de schoonheid van een 14-jarige Poolse jongen.

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

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.

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature. It 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. 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. In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.

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