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Reading lists

Murder and malaise: the most doomed holidays in literature

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An editor’s guide to the VINTAGE European Classics series

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From page to screen: gay love in cinema

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

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. 
 
He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

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

Buddenbrooks

Mann's semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The book that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature

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 was born in 1875 in Lübeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

Discover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic. 
 
The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success. 
 
In this, Mann's first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays 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

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century

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.

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. 
 
He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. 
 
Adrian Leverkühn is a young man destined for success. He is a composer - creative and brilliant, but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with nature. 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 
 
THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION BY H. T. LOWE-PORTER

& 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

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. 
 
He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it has sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 
 
In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

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.

The Magic Mountain

This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I

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

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards he left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University of Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he recieved in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

As Seen on BBC Between the Covers 
 
This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of the First World War. 
 
Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. 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

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.

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in L-beck and studied art and literature at the University in Munich.  He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published.  Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone.  In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  He dies in Switzerland in 1955.

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.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Lotte In Weimar

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