This is one of the greatest novels of the XXth century and I believe is one of the books everyone should read. Thomas Mann (nobel prize 1929) shows here the life of a german composer called Adrian Leverkühn, through the eyes and pen of biographer Serenus Zeitblom. Thomas Mann took Schoenberg's musical statements, Theodor Adorno's thoughts on philosophy of music, Nietzsche's biography and blended them together into a master piece, which examinates the development and degenerative process of western culture until its final crisis in Hittler's ideas. This is a novel in which everythin is at stake. It is the person itself who must define its position in the world. This is not just some little novel, in which you can relax. This is a demanding book and demands commitment from the reader... but I can only think of a few other books that are as rewarding as this one, once you have finished it.
Adrian Leverkühn is a composer trying to achieve the ultimate musical language, in which he will be able to put the essence of western culture. But this effort can only be sustained by a degenerative process, which entails a dissease and a pact with the devil. Adrian cannot love... his humanity must be sacrificed, so he can work in solitude on his music. While Serenus tells this biography, he himself witnesses from his isolation, the development and results of his nation's doings: deformation of idealism, Beethoven's music, Nietzsche's ideas and Darwin's findings... all of them are deformed in order to sustained the believing in a higher race.
This book is filled with memorable moments: the description of Adrian's father experiments are beautiful, the dialogue with the devil is one of those mesmerizing moments in literature history, and so on, and so on.
This is a book worth buying, but, more than that, worth reading over and over.

Here are collected in one volume all of Thomas Mann's non-political essays that he has wished most to preserve. The essays included are: Goethe's Faust (1938), Goethe's career as a man of letters (1932), Goethe as representative of the Bourgeois Age (1932), Goethe and Tolstoy (1922), Anna Karenina (1939), Lessing (1929), Kleit's Amphitryon (1926), Chamisso (1911), Platen (1930), Theodor Storm (1930), The old Fontane (1910), Sufferings and greatness of Richard Wagner (1933), Richard Wagner and the Ring (1937), Schopenhauer (1938), Freud and the future (1936), and Voyage with Don Quixote (1934).

....of letters between two of the patriarchs of modern German literature. One thinks of Hesse in particular as so solitary a man; here he shows another side of himself.

It is not only recommended, but it is incumbent on anyone who wishes to read this book to read "The Sorrows Of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first. Otherwise, this book will make no sense whatsoever.

Mann writes a hilarious tale of "what if?" the real life Charlotte Kestner & Goethe met up in Weimer 50 or so years after the publication of Werther. The result is a true masterpiece of writing. We get to meet Charlotte, as well as Arthur Schopenhaur's rather ditzy (at least in this novel, anyway) sister, Adele along with the almighty Goethe himself. The book centers around an interesting question: which is more real? The true life Charlotte? Or the fictional one of Werther? This is an intriguing question, as Mann furnishes the "real" Kestner (which is also a fictional one) with a "real" personality; something which was rather lacking in Goethe's story.

The book has everything one would want for fans of both Goethe and Mann. It articulates the "pressures" put on people who exist in reality who provide the inspiration for fictional characters in novels. Who, in fact, has it worse? The innocent individual who is inserted into fictional stories? Or the artist who feeds personal experiences into the machinery of his genius with the efficacy of producing great art? Who makes the greater sacrifice in the name of creativity?

This is a truly wonderful book. Although most of Mann's books have a distinctive humor to them, this one is much more lighthearted than any of his others. There is even a wonderful chapter in which we first meet Goethe....a stream-of-consciousness which asks the $60,000 question: what HAPPENS inside a mind as massive as Goethe's? It kind of reminded me of Hermann Broch's "The Death Of Virgil" which asked a similar question regarding the mental acumen of Virgil in a stream-of-consciousness way. In either case, who could ask for anything more?

This is one of Thomas Mann's shorter narrations, and it is one of the most concentrated ones, with a strong atmosphere and a simple plot. It is about a family spending their summer vacation in an Italian village about 1930. One day, a kind of magician announces a show. After some time, it is clear that he is not a normal circus magician, but he has an alarming way of behaving and the ability to manipulate and to humiliate people just by the strength of his will.

"Mario and the Magician" (something must have gone wrong with the title, Mario is not the magician) was written in 1930, a time when Europe slowly was running towards the darkness of fascism, and this explains the political background of the narration. Some people wondered why Mussolini allowed to publish an Italian translation...

This book is a incredibly good help when you want help to understand Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice". It gives you summeries of the book, analysis, a presentation of the caracters and it suggests essay topics. The book helps you to prepare for classdiscussions because of it's answers and questions. Ask yourself the questions in the book and find out if you got the understanding of the text correctly. Then you can read the answers. You can't skip reading Mann's novella and "take the easy way out." The novella contains so much details and you do have to read it just to get the wonderful feeling and context. But when you have done that, MAX notes' book gives you so much more to add to the understanding of the story. This book gives me great help and inspiration for the college essay I'm about to write. This is the best investment in literature I've done for years!

I found this book as well as Falconer's other corvette reference books well stocked with great looking original corvettes. You don't just get pictures though. He accompanies the photos with lots of information and data associated with each production year. What I like most of all is it appears most of the corvettes are tagged and street driven, not pampered show cars. I will keep this book around for a long time.

In these overlooked early stories, the great German Novelist Thomas Mann, best know for his novella Death in Venice, and his massive novel, Magic Mountain (set in Switzerland), experiments with the character of the sensitive (sometimes sickly) artist skittering on the outskirts, or being powerfully pulled in, to romantic and philosophical infatuation. Said to mark the introduction of psychology into romantic fiction, the stories (such as Fallen, 1898, and The Will to Happiness, 1896) were written in the so-called Gay Nineties (the 1890s)--the decade which took with it Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. In these short stories Mann is playful but works with a precociously masterful touch. His themes are romance, deception, and the limitations of previous literary convention. In one story a desirable actress turns out to be a prostitute, in another a homely woman admired for her mind turns down the artist after he changes his about her desirability,and in perhaps the most powerful story, a most desirable spouse is revealed to be the exact opposite--perhaps. Nietzsche's preoccupation with surfaces, the infinite artistic allure of deception, and the gulf separating the outside world from that of the human mind are deftly handled in these early stories by an acknowledged master of the fictional form.

Whether you are reading or rereading one or all twelve of the great works discussed in this lovely volume, Rudolph Binion's theory--that a subtext undercutting a text provides the appeal of a classic--will add intrigue to the deep enjoyment of spending time with fine literature. I found the essays in themselves to be written with such wit and ingenuity that I read from one to another to see if I agreed with the subtext the author was proposing, and to see as well how the theory developed from one to the next, but then I went back to the works themselves to read them with a new eye. In so doing, I rediscovered Goethe, Flaubert, Stendhal, Ibsen, and Mann. I still have seven to go. The pieces are short and lively. Each by itself has the quality of a fine literary essay, but because the author develops a theme throughout, each also develops logically and gracefully from the previous one.

This is clearly the definitive biography of Thomas Mann ...by perhaps this era's leading biographer .....to be sure there are several bios out there ....but having read the most recent two ....i must say they were merely an excursus compared to Mr. Heymans outstanding effort ! his is both comprehensive and perspicuous ....not an easy task when being an exegete of Mann's life and works ....Mann was both an accomplished author and prescient political analyst .....and led a long and complicated life .....which Mr. Heyman documents with unusual clarity and verve!.. of the three major biographies on T.Mann recently published ....his (heymans) is the best of the trio ....the other two being discursive and garbled thus confusing to the common reader by all means read this edition if you have any interest in T. Mann's work and life...it's COMPLEAT ! thankyou Mr. Heyman !