Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge Companions to Literature)"

Written with a dark pain and drama that recalls the novels of Dickens, Gathering Evidence is a powerful and compelling memoir of youth by one of the twentieth century’s most gifted writers.Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather in right-wing, Catholic Austria. He ran away from home at age fifteen. Three years later, he contracted pneumonia and was placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, where he observed first-hand—and with unflinching acuity—the cruel nature of protracted suffering and death. From the age of twenty-one, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man’s testament—and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.Included in this edition is My Prizes, a collection of Bernhard’s viciously funny and revelatory essays on his later literary life. Here is a portrait of the artist as a prize-winner: laconic, sardonic, shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself.

This selection of Thomas Mann's letters, first published in a Vintage edition in 1975, spans sixty-six years from the first, written by a precocious fourteen-year-old, to the last, composed on his deathbed by the eighty-year-old Nobel Laureate, and includes letters to family and to such celebrated contemporaries as Gide, Freud, Brecht, Einstein, Hesse, Schoenberg, and Adorno. Covering two world wars and exile in Europe and America, Mann's letters offer the reader insight into the concerns and values of one of the great writers of our time.

These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s fiction introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit.This second volume of Selected Writings reveals a writer who may stand as Kafka’s greatest heir. Dürrenmatt’s novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. Apart from The Pledge, a requiem to the detective story that was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, none of the works in this volume are available elsewhere in English. Among the most evocative fiction included here are two novellas: The Assignment and Traps. The Assignment tells the story of a woman filmmaker investigating a mysterious murder in an unnamed Arab country and has been hailed by Sven Birkerts as “a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.” Traps, meanwhile, is a chilling comic novella about a traveling salesman who agrees to play the role of the defendant in a mock trial among dinner companions—and then pays the ultimate penalty.Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

Throughout his life, Herman Hesse was a devoted letter writer. He corresponded, not just with friends and family, but also with his readers. From his letters home from the seminary at age fourteen, to his last letters, written days before his death at eighty-five, this selection gives a sense of the author of some of the most widely read books of the century.

This vivid, sometimes tragic, and often humorous literary biography brings to life as never before the extraordinary talent and complex person who was Thomas Mann.Engrossing vignettes enable us to enter Mann's life and work from unique angles. We meet the difficult, even unsavory private man: hypochondriac and nervous, narcissistic and vainglorious, isolated and greedy for love, shy and often ungenerous. But we are also introduced to a man who lived an eventful life, was capable of great kindness, loved dogs, doted on his daughters, and listened to Jack Benny.We experience Mann's tragedy as the quintessential German forced by the rise of National Socialism first into inner exile and then into real exile in Switzerland, Princeton, and California. His letters from this time reveal the torment that exile represented for a writer whose work, indeed whose very self, was inextricably bound up with the German language.The book provides fresh and sometimes startling insights into both famous and little-known episodes in Mann's life and into his writing--the only realm in which he ever felt free. It shows how love, death, religion, and politics were not merely themes in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and other works, but were woven into the fabric of his existence and preoccupied him unrelentingly. It also teases out what is known about what Mann considered his celibate homoeroticism and what others have labeled closeted homosexuality. In particular, we learn about his affection for the young man who inspired the character of Tadzio in Death in Venice. And, against the unfocused accusations of anti-Semitism that have been leveled at Mann, the book examines in human detail his relationships with Jewish writers, friends, and family members.This is the richest available portrait of Thomas Mann as man and writer--the place to start for anyone wanting to know anything about his life, work, or times.

This biography of the 20th century's greatest German writer brings to life the extraordinary talent and complex personality of Thomas Mann. We encounter the difficult, even unsavoury, private man: hypochondriac and nervous, narcissistic and vainglorious, isolated and greedy for love. But we are also introduced to a man who suffered exile and condemnation, who was capable of great kindness, doted on his daughters and was devoted to his art. Kurzke provides fresh and sometimes startling insights into both famous and little-known episodes in Mann's life and into his writing itself - the only realm in which he ever felt free. Mann was forced by the rise of National Socialism first into inner exile and then into real exile in Switzerland, Princeton and California. His letters from this time reveal the torment that this represented for a writer whose work was inextricably bound up with the German language. This work shows how love, death, religion and politics were not merely themes in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and other writings. It also teases out what is known about what Mann considered his celibate homoeroticism and what others have labelled closeted homosexuality: in particular, we learn about his affection for the young man who inspired the character of Tadzio in Death in Venice. And, against the unfocused accusations of anti-Semitism that have been levelled at Mann, Kurzke examines in human detail his relationships with Jewish writers, friends and family members.

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece." —The New Yorker"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods." —The New RepublicThomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

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 Middle Decades Of The Eighteenth Century, To The Onset Of Uncertainty In The Modern World. The Novel Displays Mann's Interest In Decline As A Psychological Process, Where Artistic Sensibility Weakens The Ruthless Business Instincts That Founded The Buddenbrooks' Prosperity. At The Centre Is The Reluctant Businessman Thomas Buddenbrook, A Tragic Figure Who Conscientiously Dedicates Himself To A Way Of Life That Gradually Undermines Him. Mike Mitchell's New English Translation Is Accompanied By Ritchie Robertson's Introduction And Explanatory Notes, Illuminating The Cultural, Philosophical, And Personal Context Of The Novel's Composition-- Provided By Publisher.

The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer."Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."— SpectatorWidely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix SÃguier.

These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s plays introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit.Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the Cold War: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.