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Reading lists

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Buddenbrooks

Wealthy, esteemed, and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values. 
 
But as the tides of modernity and change sweep through Europe, their once-stable world begins to crumble, along with the tenets on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. Spanning four generations, this semi-autobiographical family epic records the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty. 
 
'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times 
 
 
 
(Cover may vary)

Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century

A simple but magnificent proof of genius. A first novel by a 25-year-old with absolute command of his craft, uncanny knowledge of his world, its past and present, and a daring originality which makes its last pages among the most startlingly moving I know

One of the best novels of the 20th century

That definitive epic of German family life

Has extraordinary value as a document over and above its importance as literature. The friendly dispassionateness of the book, the amplitude, the final perfection of clearness, make it as satisfying as a Dürer drawing

An absorbing, well-observed, almost film-like telling of a family in Lubeck over a generation or two

A detailed portrait of a family and its destructive impact

One of the greatest things a novel can do is to create a world - and this is one of the most richly evoked and inhabited of all

Wealthy, esteemed, and deeply rooted in tradition, the Buddenbrook family epitomises nineteenth-century German bourgeois values. 
 
But as the tides of modernity and change sweep through Europe, their once-stable world begins to crumble, along with the tenets on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. Spanning four generations, this semi-autobiographical family epic records the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty. 
 
'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times

Doctor Faustus

To unlock his full creative potential, Adrian Leverkühn makes a lethal pact with nature and intentionally contracts syphilis. 
 
A brilliant young composer, Adrian believes that the disease-induced madness will fuel his genius. But while his music reaches new heights, his mind and morality begin to unravel. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall. 
 
'Arguably the great German novel' New York Times 
 
 
 
(Cover may vary)

Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture

Perhaps not since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a novelist conveyed so tangibly and exaltedly the mechanism and the aesthetic effect in musical performance

Mann struggled with his own conflicted feelings about Germany and German culture, and in his magisterial Doctor Faustus found the perfect metaphor for what his country had done; it had bargained with the devil, and lost.

To unlock his full creative potential, Adrian Leverkühn makes a lethal pact with nature and intentionally contracts syphilis. 
 
A brilliant young composer, Adrian believes that the disease-induced madness will fuel his genius. But while his music reaches new heights, his mind and morality begin to unravel. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall. 
 
'Arguably the great German novel' New York Times

Death in Venice And Other Stories

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. 
 
Ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach is on holiday in Venice when he first notices a fellow guest in the foyer of his hotel: an exceptionally beautiful boy who is staying there with his family. Admiration gives way to obsession as his days begin to revolve around seeing the boy. Meanwhile, ominous signs point to a disease spreading through the magnificent, but decaying, city and, blinded by his fixation, Aschenbach fails to notice. 
 
Death in Venice is the finale of this seven-story collection, marked by masterful storytelling and profound, often haunting, insight. 
 
 
 
 
(Cover may vary)

The real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration... A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche

This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece...seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself

Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature

Thomas Mann's story of obsession and spiritual malaise

The real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration...A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche

What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy...Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature

Mann's obsessive story explores the complex, haunted relationship between an ageing writer and a beautiful Polish boy

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. 
 
Ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach is on holiday in Venice when he first notices a fellow guest in the foyer of his hotel: an exceptionally beautiful boy who is staying there with his family. Admiration gives way to obsession as his days begin to revolve around seeing the boy. Meanwhile, ominous signs point to a disease spreading through the magnificent, but decaying, city and, blinded by his fixation, Aschenbach fails to notice. 
 
Death in Venice is the finale of this seven-story collection, marked by masterful storytelling and profound, often haunting, insight.

Confessions Of Felix Krull

The late, great work of Thomas Mann - a comic novel of deception and misplaced confidence - back in print for the first time in over twenty years

Discover Thomas Mann's comic novel of deception and misplaced confidence - back in print for the first time in over twenty years. 
 
 Waiter by day, man about Paris by night; the young and good looking Felix Krull has created for himself a personality to charm and deceive the world of wealth. When the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal that he can't refuse, the young Felix finds himself on the pathway that will elevate him into the world of riches. 
'The most astonishing work that Mann ever wrote and also one of the most perfect' Edwin Muir

Lotte In Weimar

Thomas Mann's self-reflexive meditation on the power of representation and the tyranny of the writer's imagination

Read Thomas Mann's meditation on the power of literary representation and the tyranny of the writer's imagination. 
 
 Mann's novel, written some 150 years after Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, follows Lotte Kestner, Goethe's real-life heroine, as she makes a pilgrimage to Weimar to meet the author who courted her forty years before. To her surprise, Lotte is greeted on her arrival as a celebrity and immediately taken up into Goethe's set. Time and place are brilliantly evoked in Mann's novel, but its genius lies in his masterful portrayal of Goethe himself, and of the astonishing influence he exerted on his contemporaries. 
 
'A masterpiece' Stefan Zweig

& other stories

Mario and the Magician

An extraordinary collection of stories from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature - the title story, one of Mann's most political, explores the rise of facism by way of a mysterious magician in a small Italian village

The greatest German novelist of the 20th century

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative  of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was  up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the  modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the  emptiness left by social and religious collapse

Probably the greatest of modern German novelists

Mann’s short stories explore his abiding interest in the split nature of humanity and the discordance of the world it inhabits. In ‘A Man and his Dog’, domestic tempests are symbols of the muddle of humanity. In ‘The Black Swan’, the demands of intellect clash with physical desires. And in ‘Mario and the Magician’ a young family on holiday in Italy encounters a creepy entertainer: Cipolla, a hypnotist with a fascist-like will to control his audience. 
 
Written between 1918 and 1953, this collection shows the literary development of one of Germany’s most important writers.

Death In Venice

One of twelve indispensable classic titles you'll want to treasure, at a price that allows you to collect them all.  The perfect introduction to the depth and breadth of the superlative Vintage Classics list. A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores the artist's relation to life.

A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores the artist's relation to life. 
 
First published in 1912, Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes', and meets a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the author has for this shorter form of fiction.

The Magic Mountain

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.

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for 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.

Joseph and His Brothers

This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner's great masterpiece is a major literary event.

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. Deploying lavish, persuasive detail, Mann conjures for us the world of patriarchs and pharaohs, the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and the universal force of human love in all its beauty, desperation, absurdity, and pain. The result is a brilliant amalgam of humor, emotion, psychological insight, and epic grandeur. 
 
Now the award-winning translator John E. Woods gives us a definitive new English version of Joseph and His Brothers that is worthy of Mann's achievement, revealing the novel's exuberant polyphony of ancient and modern voices, a rich music that is by turns elegant, coarse, and sublime.

Collected Stories

Little Herr Friedmann And Other Stories

SALES POINTS: * Autobiography in the guise of fiction - rare insight into the mind of this Nobel Prize winning writer. * Classic fiction which sells steadily to students and to the general reader. * Has been core Penguin backlist for years - now reverting to Minerva. * An essential part of the Mann reissue programme - including truly gorgeous new covers.

THE BOOK: A selection of work taken from his highly acclaimed collection Stories of a Lifetime by one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. In elegant prose, Mann explores such eternal themes as: individuals forced into the extremes of their existence, isolation and the artist's tentative position in the harsh world, the realization of one's true nature.

Royal Highness

KEY POINTS: * Mann is a giant figure in 20th Century litrature and a Nobel Prize Winner. * Has been core Peguin backlist for years- now reverting to Minerva. * Brilliant new Mann packinging. * A superb new addition to the core Minerva 20th century classics.

THE BOOK: One of Thomas Mann's most delightful stories, Royal Highness is richly resonant with may of his themes and symbols. His careful depiction of a decaying, stratified society rejuvenated by modern forces illustrates in fable what he regarded as a universal truth - that ripeness and death are a necessary condition of rebirth.

The Decline of a Family

Thomas Mann's first great novel, written at the age of 25, is an epic study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but it goes far beyond his own experience in its sweep and comprehensiveness. 
 
The novel is an astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic. Mann portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability and arrogance to a very modern uncertainty and fear.

The acclaimed, definitive translation of Mann's magnum opus 
 
‘Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?’ 
 
Thomas Mann described Joseph and His Brothers as his ‘pyramid’: his towering literary achievement, although the Nazi regime tried to sabotage its first publication. This lavish, sweeping saga retells the Biblical story of Joseph, whose dreams and visions set him apart from his siblings and lead him first to slavery and ultimately to power and prestige. With rich detail and unexpected humour, Mann paints the lost landscapes of Egypt and Canaan and brings to life the great characters of Genesis – patriarchs, pharaohs, avenged sisters and jealous brothers – in a chronicle of epic grandeur, with a family drama at its heart. 
 
Translated by John E. Woods

This excellent new translation by John E. Woods is a cause for celebration: first, because Joseph and His Brothers is in fact a great novel that will now be discovered by a new generation of readers; and second, because Woods himself is to be credited with an extraordinary achievement... Woods tackles the challenges of Mann’s wide-ranging diction with exuberance... Mann has finally found his ideal English translator.

John E. Woods, who has won praise for his translations of “Buddenbrooks,” “Dr. Faustus” and “The Magic Mountain,” has approached the Joseph tetralogy with immense conviction and enthusiasm

In a new translation by John E. Woods it is surprisingly readable, subtly humorous at times, challenging, and ultimately rewarding. It is by far the best book I have read in years.

Thomas Mann (Author) Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is widely regarded as the greatest German novelist of the twentieth century. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, was a huge success and led to a Nobel Prize in Literature. However, when the Nazis came to power, his works were blacklisted and burned and Mann was stripped of his citizenship. He spent the latter part of his life in exile in the United States and Switzerland. His other major novels include The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and Joseph and His Brothers.

Thomas Mann described Joseph and His Brothers as his ‘pyramid’: his greatest literary achievement, although the Nazi regime in his homeland did their best to tear it down on its first publication. A vivid and dazzlingly ambitious epic, it retells the biblical story of Joseph, whose dreams and visions set him apart from his siblings and lead him first to slavery and ultimately to power and prestige in Egypt. With rich detail and unexpected humour, Mann paints the lost landscapes of Egypt, Canaan and Palestine and brings to life the great characters of Genesis – patriarchs, pharaohs, avenged sisters and jealous brothers – in a story of epic grandeur with a family drama at its heart. 
 
John E. Woods' translation is considered the definitive English version: a rich and immersive reading experience and a towering achievement of its own.

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation 
 
‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’ 
 
It is summer time in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and abandons himself in an intoxicating landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterpiece: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War, and a mysterious meditation on time, art, sickness and death. 
 
Translated by John E. Woods

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

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.

[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.

[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.

It is summertime in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and loses himself in a landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. 
 
The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterwork: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War and a profound meditation on time, art, sickness and death. John E. Woods’ virtuoso translations of Thomas Mann’s novels are widely recognized as the best versions available in English.

The definitive translation of 'Arguably the great German novel' (New York Times) 
 
‘This man is mad. Of that there can no longer be any doubt, and it is pitiable that no one representing psychiatric science is part of our circle’ 
 
In May 1943 a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a once-brilliant composer and the flower of German culture. He recalls how, consumed by over-reaching ambition, this friend made an unholy bargain in return for creative genius. How he enjoyed twenty-four years of unrivalled success and musical achievement – until, inevitably, he had to pay his dues. A reworking of the classic Faust legend, Doctor Faustus is one of the twentieth century’s finest novels: a powerful allegory of the rise of the Nazism, and a warning against the seductive attractions of nihilism. 
 
Translated by John E. Woods

John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece.

Doctor Faustus is Mann’s deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods.

Perhaps not since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a novelist conveyed so tangibly and exaltedly the mechanism and the aesthetic effect in musical performance

‘This man is mad. Of that there can no longer be any doubt, and it is pitiable that no one representing psychiatric science is part of our circle.’ 
 
Germany, May 1943: a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a once-brilliant composer. How his friend, consumed by over-reaching ambition, entered into a pact with the Devil. How he enjoyed twenty-four years of musical genius and extraordinary creative achievement. And how, inevitably and tragically, the Devil returned to demand satisfaction. 
 
A reworking of the classic Faust legend, Doctor Faustus is one of the great novels of the twentieth century: a powerful allegory of the rise of the Nazism in Germany and a meditation on madness, ambition and the dangerous attractions of nihilism.

The definitive translation of 'perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' (New York Times) 
 
‘I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?’ 
 
Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German dynasty as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, artistic achievement and bankruptcy. Thomas Mann’s first novel is a richly realized, profoundly moving saga of ‘the decline of a family’ as it succumbs to the forces of modernity. Published when he was only twenty-five, it was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. 
Translated by John E. Woods

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.

Wonderfully fresh and elegant…. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.

‘I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavours. Where might I be, if I were not here?’ 
 
Buddenbrooks is one of the original, and greatest, of family chronicles: the story of four generations of a wealthy and bourgeois German family as they experience all the anguish and rewards of human life: births, marriages, divorces, deaths, madness, bankruptcy and artistic achievement. Richly realized and profoundly moving, Thomas Mann’s first great novel was published when he was only twenty-five, and was one of the two books for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. 
 
John E. Woods’ elegant translation is widely acclaimed as the best available English version.

Thomas Mann

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. A novel for a lifetime not just a rainy afternoon

Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.

A life-altering book would be The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It's really thick and German. I like its sensibility, which is unashamedly intellectual.

A masterwork, unlike any other... a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing

Comparisons arise with The Waste Land, published two years earlier and also concerned to exhibit the futility of a way of life which had led to the horrors of the First World War. But while T. S. Eliot's poem is a pared-down epic of resonances and allusions, Mann's novel is a full-blown exploration, playing seemingly endless variations on the theme

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
A brief visit to a Swiss sanatorium becomes a life-altering seven-year odyssey. 
 
Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, intending to stay for just three weeks. But when he falls ill, he remains and is drawn in by the introspection and erudition that define life in the mountains. As his stay extends to seven transformative years, Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic - ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War. 
 
'Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love' Jonathan Coe, Guardian 
 
'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator

Thomas Mann

Praise for The Magic Mountain

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. ...

A monumental writer

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. ...

A monumental writer

Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love

Featuring lengthy debates between humanist freemasons and Jews-turned-Catholics, a long love-scene written entirely in French and a brilliant hallucinatory journey down the snowy slopes, it merits multiple readings. ...

A monumental writer

Books by Thomas Mann

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