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Reading lists

From page to screen: gay love in cinema

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

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His first major novel, Buddenbrooks, had sold over a million copies in Germany alone before it was banned and burned by Hitler.

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.

Thomas Mann

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 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

Series by Thomas Mann

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Articles featuring Thomas Mann

From page to screen: gay love in cinema

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