Thomas Mann

A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting...

Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed...

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 modern 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...

Royal Highness (German: Königliche Hoheit) is a 1909 novel by Thomas Mann. It is Mann's second novel and was written between the summer of 1906 and February 1909. Royal Highness is characterized by its fairytale-like qualities and was modeled after Mann's own romance and marriage to Katia Mann in February 1905. First published in 1909 in Die neue Rundschau, the novel was met with great enthusiasm from the public. However, it was met with a more divided...

Thomas Mann regarded his monumental re-telling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus, telling of Joseph's fall into slavery and his rise to be lord over Egypt. As Joseph is saved from the well and sold to Egypt, he adopts a new name, Osarseph, replacing the Jo- element with a reference to Osiris to indicate that he is now in the underworld. This change of name to account for changing circumstances encourages Amenhotep to change his own...

Retelling of a medieval legend "of the exceeding mercy of God and the birth of the Pope Gregory."

This first major novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse incorporates a theme he returned to again and again in most of his works: the fundamental duality of existence. The youthful protagonist, Emil Sinclair, however, his older friend, Max Demian, manages to both clarify and complicate Sinclair's confusion about life's conflicting values. Recounted in engaging prose, rich in sympathy and imagination, this brilliant exploration of the polarities...