Most Popular Books by Thomas Mann

A sumptuous new translation of the sublime novella of desire, obsession, and one man’s downfall; another classic from the author of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. “Probably the greatest of modern German novelists.” ― The New York Times One of the pre-eminent works of modern European literature, this enthralling story of desire, beauty and infatuation follows the erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach’s descent into obsession. Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As he lingers on at the hotel, Aschenbach falls into an ever-deeper infatuation with the youth, whose curled blond hair and porcelain face fill him with rapture, and even seem to cure his stubborn writer’s block. Ignoring whispered warnings of a cholera outbreak in Venice, Aschenbach stays at the hotel and follows Tadzio with increasing obsession, his mind swirling with mad desire. Classical in structure yet roiled by disturbing passion, Death in Venice is an enormously powerful story of one man’s undoing. Full of coiled tension and vivid inner conflict, it is one of Thomas Mann’s greatest masterpieces, and appears here in a lively new translation by Lesley Chamberlain.

The ironic satire of a decaying German duchy and its rejuvenation by the appearance of an independent-minded American woman. Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to mad woman, this novel is a microcosm of Europe before the Great War. The book''s driving force is the development of a love between the young Prince, hidebound by tradition, and the exotic, beautiful Imma. Written by Noble Prize winning author Thomas Mann, his careful depiction of a decaying 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.

Degeneration of German merchant family of Lubeck, 1830 to 1870. Analogous to Galsworthy''s "Forsyte Saga". For other editions, see Author Catalog.

Recounts the enchanted career of the con man extraordinaire Felix Krull--a man unhampered by the moral precepts that govern the conduct of ordinary people.

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 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.

A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann''s first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain. In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann''s novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.

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)

The Holy Sinner explores a subject that fascinated Thomas Mann to the end of his life - the origins of evil and evil''s connection with magic. Here Mann uses a medieval legend about "the exceeding mercy of God and the birth of the blessed Pope Gregory" - illuminating the notion of original sin and transcendence of evil.

"Mann''s pivotal role during the Nazi period as perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for the ''other Germany'' that lived in exile means that anyone studying the history of our century must begin with him. . . . These letters are literary and cultural documents that have few equals in our age."--James K. Lyon, University of California, San Diego "Mann''s pivotal role during the Nazi period as perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for the ''other Germany'' that lived in exile means that anyone studying the history of our century must begin with him. . . . These letters are literary and cultural documents that have few equals in our age."--James K. Lyon, University of California, San Diego

A classic, controversial book exploring German culture and identity by the author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, now back in print. When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation. Thomas took it as an unforgivable stab in the back. The bitter dispute between the brothers would swell into the strange, tortured, brilliant, sometimes perverse literary performance that is Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a book that Mann worked on and added to throughout the war and that bears an intimate relation to his postwar masterpiece The Magic Mountain. Wild and ungainly though Mann’s reflections can be, they nonetheless constitute, as Mark Lilla demonstrates in a new introduction, a key meditation on the freedom of the artist and the distance between literature and politics. The NYRB Classics edition includes two additional essays by Mann: “Thoughts in Wartime” (1914), translated by Mark Lilla and Cosima Mattner; and “On the German Republic” (1922), translated by Lawrence Rainey.