Konrad silberfalk (26 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Before Buddenbrooks. Before Death in Venice. Before the Nobel Prize - six early stories, written between 1896 and 1898, in which a twenty-something Thomas Mann discovered, one narrative at a time, the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career.In Little Herr Friedemann, a man disabled since infancy has built an entire philosophy around careful renunciation - until a woman he cannot resist arrives and dismantles it completely. In Death, a dying man's diary renders, from the inside, the strange clarity of a consciousness that knows its own end is near. In The Will to Happiness, a sickly artist gambles his life on the conviction that happiness itself might be strong enough to defeat physical decline.In Disillusionment, a stranger on a Venice terrace delivers a devastating meditation on the gap between what literature promises and what life actually provides. In The Clown, a cultivated dilettante confesses, at last, the hollowness of a life spent appreciating art and love without ever fully committing to either. And in Tobias Mindernickel, a lonely, mocked man finds unexpected joy in a dog he adopts - joy that reveals, when threatened, something genuinely unsettling about loneliness and the need to control one's own suffering.Six stories. One extraordinary young talent, already fully formed. The beginning of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary careers.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Tonio Kroeger is fourteen years old, the son of a proper north German consul and a beautiful, unconventional mother from the south, when he first understands that he is different from everyone around him. He writes poetry his teachers mock. He loves, from a hopeless distance, a blond and blue-eyed classmate who will never understand him. He watches the easy, unreflective happiness of ordinary people the way a starving man might watch a feast through glass.Years later, having become the writer he was always going to become, Tonio explains himself to a friend in Munich: the artist, he insists, must die to ordinary life in order to render it. Feeling must become material. Love must become observation. It is a cold philosophy, eloquently defended, and it is not quite true.When Tonio travels north again - a stranger now in the town of his childhood, mistaken at one point for a criminal simply for looking foreign in the place he was born - he encounters, by chance, the golden, ordinary people he once loved and envied in equal measure. And he discovers that what he wants, after everything, is not distance but belonging: not the icy purity of art alone, but a way back to the warmth he never stopped watching.First published in 1903, when Mann was twenty-eight, Tonio Kroeger is one of the most personal and most beloved works he ever wrote - a young writer's tender, unsparing portrait of what it costs to become an artist, and what, in the end, an artist most wants to keep.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Gustav von Aschenbach has built an entire life, and a considerable reputation, on discipline. A distinguished writer, ennobled by his government, widowed young, he has organized every hour of every day around the conviction that great art is achieved through rigorous self-mastery, never through surrender to mere feeling.Exhausted and restless, he travels to Venice for what he tells himself will be simple rest. There, among the guests of his grand hotel, he sees a Polish family - and among them, a boy of extraordinary, almost unbearable beauty. Aschenbach tells himself this fascination is philosophical: the contemplation of ideal form, the kind of aesthetic experience Plato once described. He tells himself many things. One by one, over the course of a summer, they stop being true.As a cholera epidemic spreads quietly through the city - concealed by officials and merchants unwilling to frighten away the tourist trade - Aschenbach makes a choice that the entire novella has been preparing the reader to expect. His private collapse and the city's public corruption become, by the novella's end, impossible to separate.First published in 1912, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous and most enduring work - a novella of exacting, formal perfection about the catastrophic vulnerability of the disciplined mind to the beauty it believed it could master. It inspired Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1971 film and Benjamin Britten's final opera, and remains, more than a century later, one of the most powerful and unsettling studies of desire, art, and self-deception ever written.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Berlin, the late 1920s. The inflation has eaten the Bernheim fortune. The nightclubs are full. The Republic is holding, more or less. And on the streets, the paramilitary organizations are growing.Paul Bernheim has returned from the war to find himself heir to a bank he doesn't understand, in a world he can't quite navigate. He is charming, educated, and entirely without direction - a man of the middle in every sense, caught between his German father's world and his Jewish mother's, between ambition and inertia, between a social order that is dissolving and whatever is coming to replace it.His younger brother Theodor has found an answer. It is not a good one.Into Paul's life comes Nikolai Brandeis - a Russian emigre of mysterious origins who has built a commercial empire in Weimar Berlin through methods nobody examines too carefully. He offers Paul an arrangement. The arrangement will prove, in ways Paul does not anticipate, to be a mirror of everything wrong with the world he lives in.Published in 1929 - the year of the Wall Street Crash, four years before Hitler's rise to power - Right and Left is Joseph Roth's most politically acute novel, a portrait of Weimar Germany so precisely observed that it reads now as an act of prophecy. By the author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Luebeck, 1835. The Buddenbrook family is at the height of its prosperity: Johann Buddenbrook, grain merchant and patriarch, opens the doors of his magnificent new home to the cream of the city's society, and the world seems arranged to his satisfaction. The firm is strong. The family is respected. The future is assured.It will not always be so.Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a north German merchant dynasty from the peak of their wealth and social confidence to the extinction of their family line - a span of four decades rendered in extraordinary detail, from births and deaths and weddings and bankruptcies to recipes, sermons, schoolroom humiliations, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of small defeats. With each generation, something shifts: where the founders acted, their children reflect; where the children reflected, their grandchildren agonize; and where the last Buddenbrook should be carrying the firm forward, he can only play the piano and wait for an end he cannot bring himself to resist.Thomas Mann began writing Buddenbrooks at twenty-one, completed it at twenty-five, and published it in 1901 to immediate controversy and eventual worldwide fame. It is his first novel and, by the Swedish Academy's own judgment, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 - a debut that has outlasted almost everything written in its century, a family chronicle that is also a philosophical meditation on what it costs a civilization to become fully aware of itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Klaus Heinrich is born the second son of a Grand Duke, in a small German principality so reduced in fortune that its royal family maintains all the ceremony of monarchy over a treasury that is, in practice, nearly empty. He is also born with a withered left hand - a defect concealed from public view from his earliest infancy, and one that comes, over the years, to represent something larger: a life spent being watched, admired, and treated correctly by everyone around him, and genuinely known by almost no one.When his fragile elder brother inherits the throne and cannot bear its public duties, Klaus Heinrich is called upon to perform them in his place - Royal Highness in appearance, entirely hollow in substance, representing a magnificence his country can no longer afford.Then Imma Spoelmann arrives - daughter of an American industrialist of enormous wealth, brilliant, unsentimental, and entirely unimpressed by royal ceremony. She begins to teach the prince economics. She has no interest in what he represents. She is interested in who he actually is.First published in 1909, Royal Highness is Thomas Mann's second novel - lighter, warmer, and more optimistic than the great tragic works that made him famous, and, in his own later estimation, essential to everything he wrote afterward. A fairy tale for grown readers: witty, tender, and quietly wise about the difference between the life we are given to perform and the life we actually want to live.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Luebeck, 1835. The Buddenbrook family is at the height of its prosperity: Johann Buddenbrook, grain merchant and patriarch, opens the doors of his magnificent new home to the cream of the city's society, and the world seems arranged to his satisfaction. The firm is strong. The family is respected. The future is assured.It will not always be so.Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a north German merchant dynasty from the peak of their wealth and social confidence to the extinction of their family line - a span of four decades rendered in extraordinary detail, from births and deaths and weddings and bankruptcies to recipes, sermons, schoolroom humiliations, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of small defeats. With each generation, something shifts: where the founders acted, their children reflect; where the children reflected, their grandchildren agonize; and where the last Buddenbrook should be carrying the firm forward, he can only play the piano and wait for an end he cannot bring himself to resist.Thomas Mann began writing Buddenbrooks at twenty-one, completed it at twenty-five, and published it in 1901 to immediate controversy and eventual worldwide fame. It is his first novel and, by the Swedish Academy's own judgment, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 - a debut that has outlasted almost everything written in its century, a family chronicle that is also a philosophical meditation on what it costs a civilization to become fully aware of itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Hans Castorp is twenty-three years old, a well-bred engineer from Hamburg, when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at the Berghof sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. He stays for seven years.The sanatorium is high above the world of ordinary time, work, and consequence. Its patients - drawn from across Europe, representing every tradition and intellectual persuasion - live in the peculiar suspended present of the chronically ill, where days blur into weeks and years pass without the usual markers of progress or purpose. Into this world Hans Castorp stumbles, receptive and passive and constitutionally unsuited for what is about to happen to his mind.What happens is a full education in the contradictions of modern European civilization, conducted through the endless, brilliant, unresolvable arguments of two great antagonists: Settembrini, the Italian humanist who believes in reason, progress, and the democratic future; and Naphta, the Jesuit authoritarian who believes in hierarchy, death, and the necessity of violence. Between them, Castorp listens. So does the reader.First published in November 1924, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's masterpiece and one of the essential novels of the twentieth century - a book about illness and time, about the state of European civilization on the eve of a catastrophe that has already happened by the time it is written, and about what it means to descend, finally, from a mountain and re-enter a world that has been waiting, all this time, to destroy itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Hans Castorp is twenty-three years old, a well-bred engineer from Hamburg, when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at the Berghof sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. He stays for seven years.The sanatorium is high above the world of ordinary time, work, and consequence. Its patients - drawn from across Europe, representing every tradition and intellectual persuasion - live in the peculiar suspended present of the chronically ill, where days blur into weeks and years pass without the usual markers of progress or purpose. Into this world Hans Castorp stumbles, receptive and passive and constitutionally unsuited for what is about to happen to his mind.What happens is a full education in the contradictions of modern European civilization, conducted through the endless, brilliant, unresolvable arguments of two great antagonists: Settembrini, the Italian humanist who believes in reason, progress, and the democratic future; and Naphta, the Jesuit authoritarian who believes in hierarchy, death, and the necessity of violence. Between them, Castorp listens. So does the reader.First published in November 1924, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's masterpiece and one of the essential novels of the twentieth century - a book about illness and time, about the state of European civilization on the eve of a catastrophe that has already happened by the time it is written, and about what it means to descend, finally, from a mountain and re-enter a world that has been waiting, all this time, to destroy itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Tonio Kroeger is fourteen years old, the son of a proper north German consul and a beautiful, unconventional mother from the south, when he first understands that he is different from everyone around him. He writes poetry his teachers mock. He loves, from a hopeless distance, a blond and blue-eyed classmate who will never understand him. He watches the easy, unreflective happiness of ordinary people the way a starving man might watch a feast through glass.Years later, having become the writer he was always going to become, Tonio explains himself to a friend in Munich: the artist, he insists, must die to ordinary life in order to render it. Feeling must become material. Love must become observation. It is a cold philosophy, eloquently defended, and it is not quite true.When Tonio travels north again - a stranger now in the town of his childhood, mistaken at one point for a criminal simply for looking foreign in the place he was born - he encounters, by chance, the golden, ordinary people he once loved and envied in equal measure. And he discovers that what he wants, after everything, is not distance but belonging: not the icy purity of art alone, but a way back to the warmth he never stopped watching.First published in 1903, when Mann was twenty-eight, Tonio Kroeger is one of the most personal and most beloved works he ever wrote - a young writer's tender, unsparing portrait of what it costs to become an artist, and what, in the end, an artist most wants to keep.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Before Buddenbrooks. Before Death in Venice. Before the Nobel Prize - six early stories, written between 1896 and 1898, in which a twenty-something Thomas Mann discovered, one narrative at a time, the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career.In Little Herr Friedemann, a man disabled since infancy has built an entire philosophy around careful renunciation - until a woman he cannot resist arrives and dismantles it completely. In Death, a dying man's diary renders, from the inside, the strange clarity of a consciousness that knows its own end is near. In The Will to Happiness, a sickly artist gambles his life on the conviction that happiness itself might be strong enough to defeat physical decline.In Disillusionment, a stranger on a Venice terrace delivers a devastating meditation on the gap between what literature promises and what life actually provides. In The Clown, a cultivated dilettante confesses, at last, the hollowness of a life spent appreciating art and love without ever fully committing to either. And in Tobias Mindernickel, a lonely, mocked man finds unexpected joy in a dog he adopts - joy that reveals, when threatened, something genuinely unsettling about loneliness and the need to control one's own suffering.Six stories. One extraordinary young talent, already fully formed. The beginning of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary careers.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Gustav von Aschenbach has built an entire life, and a considerable reputation, on discipline. A distinguished writer, ennobled by his government, widowed young, he has organized every hour of every day around the conviction that great art is achieved through rigorous self-mastery, never through surrender to mere feeling.Exhausted and restless, he travels to Venice for what he tells himself will be simple rest. There, among the guests of his grand hotel, he sees a Polish family - and among them, a boy of extraordinary, almost unbearable beauty. Aschenbach tells himself this fascination is philosophical: the contemplation of ideal form, the kind of aesthetic experience Plato once described. He tells himself many things. One by one, over the course of a summer, they stop being true.As a cholera epidemic spreads quietly through the city - concealed by officials and merchants unwilling to frighten away the tourist trade - Aschenbach makes a choice that the entire novella has been preparing the reader to expect. His private collapse and the city's public corruption become, by the novella's end, impossible to separate.First published in 1912, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous and most enduring work - a novella of exacting, formal perfection about the catastrophic vulnerability of the disciplined mind to the beauty it believed it could master. It inspired Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1971 film and Benjamin Britten's final opera, and remains, more than a century later, one of the most powerful and unsettling studies of desire, art, and self-deception ever written.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A gypsy woman tells the young Nicholas Tarabas his fate: he will be both a murderer and a saint. It is not the kind of prophecy a young man knows what to do with. He will spend his entire life finding out.From provincial Russia to New York, from the trenches of the First World War to the command of a Galician garrison town, Tarabas moves through the upheavals of the early twentieth century with the terrifying force of a man who has never found a place he belongs. He is brave beyond reason, brutal beyond necessity, and possessed of a certainty that ordinary men find either magnetic or unbearable. Then, in a small town called Koryla, he commits an act of cruelty he cannot walk away from - and the second half of the prophecy begins.First published in 1934, the first novel Roth completed in exile after fleeing Hitler's Germany, Tarabas is one of his most elemental and most haunting works - a novel written in the register of folk tale and fable, following a single extraordinary soul from violence to repentance across a landscape of war, revolution, and destruction. Hermann Hesse called it one of Roth's most beautiful books.A novel about fate, guilt, and the extraordinary cost of becoming what you were always meant to be.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Berlin, the late 1920s. The inflation has eaten the Bernheim fortune. The nightclubs are full. The Republic is holding, more or less. And on the streets, the paramilitary organizations are growing.Paul Bernheim has returned from the war to find himself heir to a bank he doesn't understand, in a world he can't quite navigate. He is charming, educated, and entirely without direction - a man of the middle in every sense, caught between his German father's world and his Jewish mother's, between ambition and inertia, between a social order that is dissolving and whatever is coming to replace it.His younger brother Theodor has found an answer. It is not a good one.Into Paul's life comes Nikolai Brandeis - a Russian emigre of mysterious origins who has built a commercial empire in Weimar Berlin through methods nobody examines too carefully. He offers Paul an arrangement. The arrangement will prove, in ways Paul does not anticipate, to be a mirror of everything wrong with the world he lives in.Published in 1929 - the year of the Wall Street Crash, four years before Hitler's rise to power - Right and Left is Joseph Roth's most politically acute novel, a portrait of Weimar Germany so precisely observed that it reads now as an act of prophecy. By the author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Friedrich Kargan has no country, no father, and no name that the world will recognize. Born illegitimate on the eastern margins of the old Russian empire, he finds in the revolutionary movement what his personal history has denied him: a purpose, a community, a reason to exist.He will give everything to the cause - his youth, his freedom, years of Siberian exile, the one love of his life. And when the revolution finally succeeds, he will return to Russia to see what has been built in the name of everything he believed in.What he finds will cost him the rest.The Silent Prophet is Joseph Roth's own Trotsky novel - written in the late 1920s at the height of speculation about the fate of the exiled revolutionary, based on Roth's firsthand observations in Moscow in 1926, and never published during his lifetime. Set against the collapse of the old European order and the betrayal of the revolution by its own victors, it is a portrait of a man who gave himself entirely to history and was discarded by it - told with the precision, the melancholy, and the political intelligence that made Roth one of the essential writers of the twentieth century.Three manuscripts survived his death in Paris in 1939. The novel was reconstructed and published in German in 1966, and in English in 1979. By the author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Paris, March 1815. Napoleon Bonaparte has returned from exile on Elba, and the city receives him with the roar of crowds and the flight of the king he has displaced. For a hundred days, he will rule again - alone in the Tuileries, surrounded by advisors he cannot trust, preparing for the battle that will end everything.In the corridors of his palace, a Corsican laundress named Angelina goes about her work. She has refused two proposals of marriage. She has a child she raises alone. She loves only one man in the world, and he does not know her name.The Hundred Days tells the story of Napoleon's last return through two perspectives - the Emperor's and the laundress's - held apart by an unbridgeable distance of rank and drawn together by the same condition: a devotion so complete it asks nothing in return and receives nothing back.Published in 1935 while Roth himself was in exile in Paris, watching Europe prepare to destroy itself again, The Hundred Days is one of his most intimate and most beautiful novels - a meditation on greatness and loneliness, on the loyalty that ordinary people give to extraordinary things, and on what remains when the thing you have devoted yourself to is finally, irrevocably gone.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Vienna, 1870s. The world, as Roth tells us, is deeply and frivolously at peace. The Shah of Persia has come to visit, on the advice of his philosophical Chief Eunuch, who recommends travel as the best cure for the conviction that variety might exist. Vienna receives him with the magnificent self-assurance of a civilization that does not yet know it is running out of time.Baron Taittinger - cavalry officer, minor nobleman, chronically short of money, constitutionally incapable of foresight - is assigned to manage the Shah's entertainment. He does so with the casual irresponsibility of a man who has never once been required to consider consequences. The consequences, in this case, will be considerable. A string of pearls will change hands. A woman's life will be upended. And the social machinery of Habsburg Vienna will grind on, as elegant and as indifferent as ever.The Tale of the 1002nd Night was the last novel Joseph Roth completed, written in exile in Paris as the world he loved was being destroyed, published in 1939 - the year of his death - and suppressed by the Nazis when they invaded the Netherlands the following year. It is his most formally playful work and one of his most moving: a comedy of manners that opens like a fairy tale and darkens, gradually and with great precision, into something far more searching.By the author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Three works from the exile years of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - each different in form, all unmistakably Roth.In The Bust of Emperor Franz Joseph, a Polish count of the old Habsburg world finds himself stranded in a new nation-state that has no language for the kind of belonging he has always taken for granted. His devotion to a vanished empire is treated as an eccentricity. It is, in fact, a form of faith.In Confession of a Murderer, a Russian exile in a Paris restaurant tells the story of his life to a group of silent listeners - a tale that moves from Odessa to St. Petersburg to revolutionary chaos and into the wreckage of exile, circling always around the question of what a man becomes when the world gives him every reason to be worse than he intended.In The False Weight, an incorruptible former soldier becomes the inspector of weights and measures in a remote Galician border town where every merchant cheats, every official takes bribes, and honesty is the only thing nobody has any use for. Then he meets a gypsy woman, and his integrity - the one thing he had left - begins to give way.Published between 1934 and 1937, during the years of Roth's Paris exile, these three works show the full range of a writer who could move between elegy, atmospheric noir, and moral fable without losing, in any register, his precise and devastating intelligence.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Klaus Heinrich is born the second son of a Grand Duke, in a small German principality so reduced in fortune that its royal family maintains all the ceremony of monarchy over a treasury that is, in practice, nearly empty. He is also born with a withered left hand - a defect concealed from public view from his earliest infancy, and one that comes, over the years, to represent something larger: a life spent being watched, admired, and treated correctly by everyone around him, and genuinely known by almost no one.When his fragile elder brother inherits the throne and cannot bear its public duties, Klaus Heinrich is called upon to perform them in his place - Royal Highness in appearance, entirely hollow in substance, representing a magnificence his country can no longer afford.Then Imma Spoelmann arrives - daughter of an American industrialist of enormous wealth, brilliant, unsentimental, and entirely unimpressed by royal ceremony. She begins to teach the prince economics. She has no interest in what he represents. She is interested in who he actually is.First published in 1909, Royal Highness is Thomas Mann's second novel - lighter, warmer, and more optimistic than the great tragic works that made him famous, and, in his own later estimation, essential to everything he wrote afterward. A fairy tale for grown readers: witty, tender, and quietly wise about the difference between the life we are given to perform and the life we actually want to live.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Luebeck, 1835. The Buddenbrook family is at the height of its prosperity: Johann Buddenbrook, grain merchant and patriarch, opens the doors of his magnificent new home to the cream of the city's society, and the world seems arranged to his satisfaction. The firm is strong. The family is respected. The future is assured.It will not always be so.Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a north German merchant dynasty from the peak of their wealth and social confidence to the extinction of their family line - a span of four decades rendered in extraordinary detail, from births and deaths and weddings and bankruptcies to recipes, sermons, schoolroom humiliations, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of small defeats. With each generation, something shifts: where the founders acted, their children reflect; where the children reflected, their grandchildren agonize; and where the last Buddenbrook should be carrying the firm forward, he can only play the piano and wait for an end he cannot bring himself to resist.Thomas Mann began writing Buddenbrooks at twenty-one, completed it at twenty-five, and published it in 1901 to immediate controversy and eventual worldwide fame. It is his first novel and, by the Swedish Academy's own judgment, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 - a debut that has outlasted almost everything written in its century, a family chronicle that is also a philosophical meditation on what it costs a civilization to become fully aware of itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Four works. One career. The full range of Joseph Roth.In The Spider's Web - his first novel, serialized in 1923 - a mediocre, resentful veteran of the First World War discovers that in Weimar Berlin, ambition without conscience is the most reliable path to power. Written in cold, furious prose utterly unlike anything else Roth produced, it is the most prescient novel about the rise of fascism ever written - and it appeared two days before Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch.In April: The Story of a Love Affair - brief, luminous, quietly devastating - a young man moves carelessly through a summer encounter that means everything to the woman and nothing to him. A story about the asymmetry of feeling, told with the restraint of a writer who trusts his reader entirely.In Fallmerayer the Stationmaster - widely admired as one of the finest things Roth ever wrote - a man of complete ordinariness, defined entirely by routine and habit, encounters something unexpected at his railway station and discovers, too late, that he is capable of an absolute feeling. The discovery costs him everything.In The Emperor's Tomb - his last completed novel, published in 1938, the year of the Anschluss - Franz Ferdinand Trotta watches the final extinction of the Austro-Hungarian world his family served, and goes to stand before the vault where the Habsburg emperors lie buried. One of the most quietly devastating endings in twentieth-century fiction.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Five works across fifteen years. One vision, unwavering.In Hotel Savoy, Gabriel Dan - a returning prisoner of war - checks into a vast, crumbling hotel in post-war Lodz where the displaced and the dispossessed wait, floor by floor, for a rich man's return from America to change everything. A world in miniature. A world in ruins.In Rebellion, Andreas Pum has lost a leg in the war and received a medal and a barrel-organ permit in exchange. He is grateful, faithful, and entirely trusting in the state that broke him - until a single altercation on a tram sets in motion a catastrophe his innocence cannot prevent.In A Chapter of Revolution, a winter train crawls through a frozen Russian landscape between Kursk and Voronezh. The men aboard have made a revolution. The revolution is already becoming something else.In The Silent Prophet - written in the late 1920s, rejected by his publisher, found in three fragmentary manuscripts after his death - Friedrich Kargan gives everything to the revolutionary cause and returns to find that the cause has been replaced by its opposite, and that no one knows what to do with the men who actually believed.In The Legend of the Holy Drinker - the last work Roth completed, written in Paris in the final months of his life - a homeless man living under the bridges of the Seine is given two hundred francs and asked to repay the debt to the Little St. Therese. He intends to. He always intends to. The result is one of the most mysterious and most beautiful novellas of the twentieth century.By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. At the Battle of Solferino in 1859, a Slovene infantryman saved the Emperor Franz Joseph's life by knocking him to the ground before he was shot. He was ennobled for this - became the Baron von Trotta, had his portrait painted, hung it in his house. Then he discovered that the school textbooks had transformed his act into a legend: a cavalry officer, a more heroic gesture, the story the empire required rather than the thing that had occurred. He petitioned the Emperor to correct the record. The Emperor declined. The Hero of Solferino withdrew from public life and never spoke of it again.His son became a district captain - civil servant, not soldier, as the father had required. His grandson became a cavalry officer and then an infantry officer on the eastern frontier of the empire, where the Poles and Ukrainians and Jews and Germans lived in the specific proximity of a world organized around an imperial principle rather than a national one - and where everything was, by the time Carl Joseph von Trotta arrived to serve in it, already ending.Joseph Roth serialized The Radetzky March in the spring and summer of 1932, as the Weimar Republic was collapsing and Hitler's rise to power was weeks away. He was writing an elegy for the Habsburg Empire - not the empire of operetta and waltzes but the specific political and cultural organization built on the principle that multiple nations and languages and religions could coexist within a single sovereign structure organized around an idea rather than an ethnicity - from the vantage point of a Europe demonstrating, with daily clarity, what the loss of that principle had cost. His readers understood what they were reading.The Radetzky March - Strauss the Elder's march of 1848, the sound of the empire at its most ceremonial - moves through the novel at intervals, each occurrence carrying a slightly different weight, until it becomes the sound of everything ending: the ceremony maintained, the march still played, the substance already gone.The Emperor ages. Carl Joseph loses his friends one by one and then loses everything else. The portrait of the Hero of Solferino - the painting of the man who had asked for the truth and been given the legend instead - hangs in every room his descendants inhabit.One of the great novels of the twentieth century - the fullest and most honest elegy for a world whose loss made the worst of what followed possible. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Hans Castorp is twenty-three years old, a well-bred engineer from Hamburg, when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at the Berghof sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. He stays for seven years.The sanatorium is high above the world of ordinary time, work, and consequence. Its patients - drawn from across Europe, representing every tradition and intellectual persuasion - live in the peculiar suspended present of the chronically ill, where days blur into weeks and years pass without the usual markers of progress or purpose. Into this world Hans Castorp stumbles, receptive and passive and constitutionally unsuited for what is about to happen to his mind.What happens is a full education in the contradictions of modern European civilization, conducted through the endless, brilliant, unresolvable arguments of two great antagonists: Settembrini, the Italian humanist who believes in reason, progress, and the democratic future; and Naphta, the Jesuit authoritarian who believes in hierarchy, death, and the necessity of violence. Between them, Castorp listens. So does the reader.First published in November 1924, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's masterpiece and one of the essential novels of the twentieth century - a book about illness and time, about the state of European civilization on the eve of a catastrophe that has already happened by the time it is written, and about what it means to descend, finally, from a mountain and re-enter a world that has been waiting, all this time, to destroy itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Hans Castorp is twenty-three years old, a well-bred engineer from Hamburg, when he travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin at the Berghof sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. He stays for seven years.The sanatorium is high above the world of ordinary time, work, and consequence. Its patients - drawn from across Europe, representing every tradition and intellectual persuasion - live in the peculiar suspended present of the chronically ill, where days blur into weeks and years pass without the usual markers of progress or purpose. Into this world Hans Castorp stumbles, receptive and passive and constitutionally unsuited for what is about to happen to his mind.What happens is a full education in the contradictions of modern European civilization, conducted through the endless, brilliant, unresolvable arguments of two great antagonists: Settembrini, the Italian humanist who believes in reason, progress, and the democratic future; and Naphta, the Jesuit authoritarian who believes in hierarchy, death, and the necessity of violence. Between them, Castorp listens. So does the reader.First published in November 1924, The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann's masterpiece and one of the essential novels of the twentieth century - a book about illness and time, about the state of European civilization on the eve of a catastrophe that has already happened by the time it is written, and about what it means to descend, finally, from a mountain and re-enter a world that has been waiting, all this time, to destroy itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Luebeck, 1835. The Buddenbrook family is at the height of its prosperity: Johann Buddenbrook, grain merchant and patriarch, opens the doors of his magnificent new home to the cream of the city's society, and the world seems arranged to his satisfaction. The firm is strong. The family is respected. The future is assured.It will not always be so.Buddenbrooks follows four generations of a north German merchant dynasty from the peak of their wealth and social confidence to the extinction of their family line - a span of four decades rendered in extraordinary detail, from births and deaths and weddings and bankruptcies to recipes, sermons, schoolroom humiliations, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of small defeats. With each generation, something shifts: where the founders acted, their children reflect; where the children reflected, their grandchildren agonize; and where the last Buddenbrook should be carrying the firm forward, he can only play the piano and wait for an end he cannot bring himself to resist.Thomas Mann began writing Buddenbrooks at twenty-one, completed it at twenty-five, and published it in 1901 to immediate controversy and eventual worldwide fame. It is his first novel and, by the Swedish Academy's own judgment, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 - a debut that has outlasted almost everything written in its century, a family chronicle that is also a philosophical meditation on what it costs a civilization to become fully aware of itself.By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…