Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain presents a panorama of European society in the first two decades of the 20th century and depicts the philosophical and metaphysical dilemmas facing people in the modern age. In the years leading up to the First World War, the fundamental elements of human nature were thrown into sharp relief by the political tensions that resulted in the ultimate metaphor for the innate destructiveness of humankind: the War itself. If such a war is the true expression of human tendencies, what hope is there for the future? Through the figure of the main character of the novel, Thomas Mann explores the alternative philosophies of life available to human beings in the modern age, and invites the reader to undertake a personal odyssey of discovery, with a view to adopting a positive approach in an era that seems to offer no clear-cut answers. This book is a comprehensive commentary on Thomas Mann’s seminal novel, one of the key literary artefacts of the 20th century. The author has taken upon himself the task of explaining all the references and allusions contained in the novel, and of providing readers who know little or no German with enough explanatory comment to enable them to understand the novel and extract the maximum reading pleasure from it.

Thomas Mann once told Susan Sontag that he considered The Magic Mountain to be his greatest novel. And few in his own day doubted the preeminence of this modernist classic. But many have argued that the age of literary modernism has passed. If this is so, how might we best understand Mann's masterpiece now? In this book of wide-ranging and original essays, which also includes a memoir of Thomas Mann by Susan Sontag, various scholars and critics explore the meanings of The Magic Mountain for the contemporary imagination.

Specially-commissioned essays explore key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life.

Thomas Mann is among the greatest of German prose writers, and was the first German novelist to reach a wide English-speaking readership since Goethe. Novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doktor Faustus attest to his mastery of subtle, distanced irony, while novellas such as Death in Venice reveal him at the height of his mastery of language. In addition to fresh insights about these best-known works of Mann, this volume treats less-often-discussed works such as Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and Felix Krull, as well as his political writings and essays. Mann himself was a paradox: his role as family-father was both refuge and façade; his love of Germany was matched by his contempt for its having embraced Hitler. While in exile during the Nazi period, he functioned as the prime representative of the "good" Germany in the fight against fascism, and he has often been remembered this way in English-speaking lands. But a new view of Mann is emerging half a century after his death: a view of him as one of the great writers of a modernity understood as extending into our 21st century. This volume provides sixteen essays by American and European specialists. They demonstrate the relevance of his writings for our time, making particular use of the biographical material that is now available.Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Manfred Dierks, Werner Frizen, Clayton Koelb, Helmut Koopmann, Wolfgang Lederer, Hannelore Mundt, Peter Pütz, Jens Rieckmann, Hans Joachim Sandberg, Egon Schwarz, and Hans Vaget.Herbert Lehnert is Research Professor, and Eva Wessell is lecturer in Humanities, both at the University of California, Irvine.

This is London in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers. This is London in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians. This is London as you've never seen it before. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016 Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019 'An eye-opening investigation into the hidden immigrant life of the city' Sunday Times 'Full of nuggets of unexpected information about the lives of others . . . It recalls the journalism of Orwell' Financial Times 'Ben Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets' The Economist

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Praised highly by Mann himself, Weigand's book (originally published in 1933) is an essential piece of criticism on Mann's monumental novel. In his study of The Magic Mountain Weigand comments on the novel's genre and organization before dissecting the themes of disease and mysticism, Mann's use of irony, and other aspects of this masterpiece of German literature.

This is the first up-to-date biography in English of Thomas Mann (1875-1955), perhaps the greatest German novelist of the twentieth century. Mann was the author of several classics of modern European fiction, including Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Trickster, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a staunch opponent of Nazism (which eventually drove him intoexile). Celebrated biographer Donald Prater traces Mann's life and work, from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the US, and his last years in Switzerland. He discusses Mann's relationship with his novelist brother Heinrich, his homosexuality, his career as aprolific essayist, and the vast achievement of his novels. But the biography devotes particular attention to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. In Mann's development from nationalistic conservatism to a vigorous humanist anti-Nazism, Prater sees a fascinatingand crucially important illustration of the 'German problem' still so much of relevance to the Europe of today. Elegantly written, and always entertaining, Thomas Mann: A Life will take its place as the major biography of Mann.

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.