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.

In zijn wereldberoemde debuut uit 1901 vertelt Thomas Mann de familiegeschiedenis van vier generaties Buddenbrook, een voornaam koopmansgeslacht uit Lübeck. De oprichter van de firma Johann Buddenbrook sr. en zijn zoon Johann jr. hebben de grondslag gelegd voor een solide, machtige familie- en bedrijfstraditie. Maar bij de kinderen van Johann jr. ondermijnen artistieke impulsen en een expansief gevoelsleven de robuuste vitaliteit van het handelsimperium. Met Thomas, die veel te kunstzinnig is voor de harde handelspraktijk, begint de zakelijke neergang. In Thomas' zoon Hanno, de vierde generatie, bereikt de tegenstelling tussen burger en kunstenaar een hoogtepunt. Met De Buddenbrooks schreef Mann, nog maar zesentwintig jaar oud, een epische roman die het verval van de negentiende-eeuwse Europese burgerlijke cultuur verbeeldt. De roman werd in meer dan dertig talen vertaald en geldt nog steeds als een van de meest gelezen klassiekers uit de Duitse literatuur.

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 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"-- Provided by publisher

Selected by scholars for its cultural significance, this work contributes essential knowledge to our understanding of civilization. Its insights and themes are vital for comprehending historical contexts and societal development.

Thomas Mann, Germany's most successful writer of prose fiction, was born in 1875 and died in 1955. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. These two stories, from Mann's middle period, concern major problems facing Germany between the wars: the first deals with the chaos of economic, social and moral values in the early twenties, and the second with the enslavement of a society by a fanatical and hypnotic dictator. In both pieces Mann's moral values are delicately pointed by his omnipresent irony.

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.