Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks opens with the prosperous merchant family gathered in their elegant Lübeck home, where playful catechism, polished manners, and carefully described rooms reveal a world of bourgeois comfort balanced on tradition and status. Tony's spirited answers, the grandfather's old-fashioned authority, the Consul's practical defense of imagination, and the arrival of guests all expose the family's affectionate closeness and the first strains between generations, class expect...

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 w...

“And—and—what comes next?” “Oh, yes, yes, what the dickens does come next? C’est la question, ma très chère demoiselle!” Frau Consul Buddenbrook shot a glance at her husband and came to the rescue of her little daughter. She sat with her mother-in-law on a straight white-enamelled sofa with yellow cushions and a gilded lion’s head at the top. The Consul was in his easy-chair beside her, and the child perched on her grandfather’s knee in the window. “Tony,” prompted the Frau Consul, “‘I bel...

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 h...

'All his powers were in decline; the only thing growing stronger in him was the conviction that all this could not last much longer, that his demise was imminent.' The Buddenbrooks (1900) was Thomas Mann's first major success. It draws on his own family history and on his vivid memories of growing up in the commercial town of Lübeck in North Germany. The narrative traces the decline of a wealthy, established merchant family, from their height during the last decad...

Tristan by Thomas Mann is a short novella that explores the tension between artistic sensitivity and ordinary life. The story takes place in a quiet sanatorium, where patients seek rest and recovery, and where the refined but eccentric writer Detlev Spinell becomes fascinated by Gabriele Klöterjahn, a delicate young woman married to a healthy and practical businessman.Spinell represents the world of art, introspection, and aesthetic refine...

Tristan by Thomas Mann is a short novella that explores the tension between artistic sensitivity and ordinary life. The story takes place in a quiet sanatorium, where patients seek rest and recovery, and where the refined but eccentric writer Detlev Spinell becomes fascinated by Gabriele Klöterjahn, a delicate young woman married to a healthy and practical businessman.Spinell represents the world of art, introspection, and aesthetic refine...

The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature.Mann started writing what was to become The Magic Mountain in 1912. It began as a much shorter narrative which revisited in a comic manner aspects of Death in Venice, a novella that he was preparing for publication. The newer work reflected his experiences and impressions during a period when ...

'One of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature' Independent'A monumental writer' Sunday TelegraphA stunning fresh translation of one of the most powerful stories of desire and undoing in modern literatureErudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach lives a life of structured routine. One day, as he puzzles over his stubborn writer's block, Aschenbach has a dazzling vision that...

'Why must I feel that almost all--no, all--of the devices and conventions used by art are today only fit for parody?' Adrian Leverkühn is a composer who, at terrible personal cost, makes the breakthrough from traditional art to extreme modernism and success. Creative and brilliant, he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Thomas Mann wrote Doctor Faustus (1947) in American exile during and just after the Second World War. A prominent and long-standing defende...

'impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and yet sacred, still honourable, even here: "I love you!"' This volume contains a generous selection of the short fiction Thomas Mann published in the years 1897 to 1912, after which he turned to larger-scale projects. The acknowledged classic among the early shorter fiction is the novella Death in Venice, in which Mann develops a lyrical style and a range of mythological allusions, through the forbidden love of a mid...

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • 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 in 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 m...