Book Description
Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella.
Customer Reviews:
A great introduction to a litery giant.......2005-12-13
This is my first time reading Thomas Mann, save for the few excerpts that appear in college literature studies. Thomas Mann is notorious for his lengthy sentences and his never-ending novels, so I picked this as a gentle introduction to his works.
Even just flipping through the short stories will give an impression of how versatile and varied Mann's writing styles could be. Death in Venice, while being his most famous work in this book, is also one of the more difficult ones to read. This was Thomas Mann at his best - his sentences, long and tortuous, rolls through the imagination paragraphs at a time. Felix Krull, on the other hand, is short and succinct, with almost a feel of modern satire permeating through it.
The translation reads pretty clean and straightforward. While this probably probably loses a bit of feel in terms of grammar and structure of the sentences, Mann's styles and the suitability of the German language to this task means that a direct translation would have less flow and may seem cumbersome.
Overall I would say this is a nice illustration of Mann's literary prodigy, without overwhelming those who are not yet initiated into reading his full-sized novels.
Okay.......2005-09-26
The book was shipped really late and that bothered me. I needed it for class, and i got it three weeks from the day i bought it.
Good Introduction to Thomas Mann - Intriguing, Complex Stories.......2005-08-21
The long novels of Thomas Mann can prove challenging, not unlike those of Henry James. Fortunately, this varied collection - Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories - offers an easier way to become acquainted with Mann's intellectual, psychologically complex literature.
Thomas Mann's lengthy sentences and complex grammatical structures markedly complicate the task of translation. H. T. Lowe-Porter's translation is considered the most accessible version, although at the expense of subdividing many of Mann's sentences. (For comparison with an excellent literal version, look at Stanley Appelbaum's translation of Death in Venice, Dover Publications, 1995).
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories was first published by Vintage Books in 1954. My edition was printed by Vintage International in 1989; it has neither an introduction nor explanatory notes.
Death in Venice (1911): While vacationing in Venice, the aging, highly respected author Gustave Ashenbach becomes mesmerized by a young boy staying at the seashore with his Polish aristocratic family. Although intellectually aware of his growing obsession, Ashenbach is unable to break away. This somber portrayal of a troubled man is a masterpiece of subtle nuances that illustrates Thomas Mann's ability to create layers of meaning.
Tonio Kroger (1903) is perhaps more biographical as it explores a writer's internal conflict between his desire to be accepted, that is to fit in to a bourgeois life, and his contradictory need to follow his artistic temperament wherever it might lead him.
Mario and the Magician (1929) is more explicitly political, depicting in the guise of an unscrupulous hypnotist a Mussolini-like character. The ending of this intriguing account is a surprise.
The setting in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925) is Munich, less than a decade after World War I, amid rampant inflation and social upheaval. The narrator, Professor Cornelius, is saddened by the loss of tradition, exemplified by modern art, music, and dance forms so popular with his older children, now young adults. He finds refuge in his study of history. Early sorrow refers to an incident involving his five year-old daughter, Ellie.
A Man and His Dog (1918) is personal, humorous, and almost idyllic, quite different from the more serious topics addressed in the other stories in this collection.
The Blood of the Walsungs (1905) is the most disturbing story in this collection. The two key characters exhibit an aristocratic arrogance and elitism that culminates in incest. In an opera scene Mann draws a close parallel between his two protagonists and Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure.
Tristan (1902) has been described as a retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde set in a sanatorium. Detlev Spinell, a tuberculosis patient staying in the Dr. Leander's medical facility, becomes infatuated with another patient, Herr Kloterjahn's wife. Spinell is a largely unsuccessful writer, one that has difficulty relating to others.
In Felix Krull (1911) the narrator is a self-serving, unscrupulous, amoral, confidence man that is somehow likeable. The story ends abruptly, leaving the reader wondering what happens next. Forty years later Thomas Mann resumed work on this story and in 1954 he published the novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, a light, often hilarious account of a man who wins the favor and love of others by enacting the roles that they desire of him.
Thomas Mann was born in Germany in 1875. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He left Germany in 1933, living primarily in Switzerland and the United States until his death in 1955.
Entertaining, Classic Literature.......2003-11-09
Thomas Mann wrote "Death in Venice" in 1911. The protagonist, formerly a self-controlled and respectable public figure, gives himself over to obsessively stalking a 14-year-old boy for whom he has erotic feelings. While these feelings would be unacceptable to most people in our era, it is still difficult for us to appreciate the degree of condemnation they would have attracted when this story was written. Yet, Sigmund Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams a decade earlier, and German intellectuals like Thomas Mann were aware that censurable urges lurk beneath conscious notice within all of us. Through this story, the author was surely struggling to come to terms with his own homoerotic urges. Judging from what he wrote, these were deeply troubling to him: corruption, decay, and condemnation are the themes he presents to us. While the images conveyed through this story are repugnant and shocking, the writing is beautiful and affecting.
Several of the other stories in this volume are of similar quality, and similarly deal with troubling themes ("Mario and the Magician," "The Blood of the Walsungs"). Yet, Mann was also capable of an extended and sincerely felt appreciation of the more benign and wholesome aspects of our world ("A Man and His Dog").
These stories are worth reading and re-reading. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and these stories, if not Nobel prize quality, at the very least show Mann to be an engaging and entertaining writer.
A Wonderfully Complex Writer.......2003-04-21
Mann is to be struggled with; his work to be attacked and repulsed - it is the embodiment of engaging, challenging fiction. It may be advisable to start out with Mario and the Magician, a splendid and accessible story of a hypnotist performing amazing acts on an incredulous audience that is itself hypnotic in alluring its character audience and the reader into a seeminly pedestrian story that turns out to have a whimsical, fantastic denouement. M&M also doubles as a grand metaphor for the fascism that was beginning to grip Germany - the awesome power of a tyrant and the dangerous nakedness of a raptured audience.
Mann passes the test of great writing, in that even in translation, one can appreciate the literary dexterity of a master at work - a writer carried away, inhabiting each sentence of his story. Some of his lesser stories, towards the end of the anthology, are sprawling introspectives and thoroughgoing accounts of places and things.
Death in Venice is a seminal work and sets the tone for Mann's subtle revelations of repressed passions and the tabboo. Mann elegantly lays bare human souls, yet keeping the lid safely fastened to the pressured jar. One of my favorites was Toni Kroger - a touching story of an artist's life, from young man to mature adult. Mann renders beautifully unrequited love and homosocial admiration by the introverted for the extroverts. In reading his stories, we may find that he expresses memories and feelings that were always there, but could not find the words for before. That, perhaps, is the highest achievement of a writer.
Book Description
Celebrated novella of a middle-aged German writer's tormented passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, and its tragic consequences. Powerful evocation of the mysterious forces of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, and the isolation of the artist in 20th-century life. New translation and extensive commentary.
Customer Reviews:
Regret Comes From Lack of Self-Awareness.......2006-08-26
Thomas Mann has taken an ages old theme, the attraction of an older, worn out man for a youthful boy, dressed it up in a series of classical allusions, and details how this attraction merely accelerates the decay of the man whose decline began long before he first saw the boy. In DEATH IN VENICE, Gustave von Aschenbach is a German writer living in pre-World War I Europe, who has been trying to balance the struggles involved in maintaining his hard-worn writing laurels with the demands those struggles have placed on his life, his health, and his emotional keel. He has become an ascetic, denying himself the pleasures of the flesh. His muse is a jealous one and demands his attention full time. Over the years, he has willingly paid the price, but the true cost becomes apparent to him only as he turns fifty years of age. He senses a void in his life. He does not know what it is or how to compensate, so he decides that travel in the answer. One of the ironies of Mann's novella is that Aschenbach's readers undoubtedly give him credit for the worldly-wise sophisticate that his many literary works of art suggest he must be. But the truth is that because of his rigorous denial of himself, in terms of maturity and emotional serenity, he is a greenhorn. He tends to view the world as he does through his books, which are laden with an abundance of classical erudition. But the real world is not Plato's Republic reborn. It is a testing ground which favors those whose feet are firmly grounded in the world of the body. Early on, as Mann subtly alludes to Aschenbach's mental and physical infirmities, his fate is a doom foretold.
Aschenbach is puzzled by the continual appearance of a weird looking old man who pops up at convenient moments to glare at him in a puzzling manner. The first time that Aschenbach sees him, he pays him scant attention, but as the visits increase in his trips around Europe, both Aschenbach's and the reader's wonderment grow. After a while, the old man begins to assume allegorical--or at least mystical--proportions. One can almost see a misty haze envelop both during their encounters. It is tempting to treat these visitations as unreal hallucinations of a mind slowly unhinging with Aschenbach seeing a version of himself, following him around Europe, as if to remind him of his looming mortality.
While in Europe, he notices a good looking Polish boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach begins to fantasize about him but dares not do more than just gaze at him from a distance. As if in a rush, the years of ascetic self-denial rupture, opening the door to his latent homosexual tendencies. Mann cleverly avoids calling a spade a spade. Instead he dresses up this fantasy in terms of Aschenbach's limited social background that had been fueled by a lifetime of classical learning. The boy, whose name is Tadziu, is described as a young Adonis, an Apollo, and other such. The only words that pass between then occur at the very end, when Aschenbach sees the boy tormented by bullies and almost, but not quite, intervenes. Aschenbach locks eyes with the boy and in that moment he knows the forbidden joy that, in a different universe might have been his. He dies, possibly of the plague, happy and decidedly ignorant of who he himself really was. Mann passes no moral judgments against Aschenbach. This is no gay bashing novel nor does he hold it up as a trumpeting to engage in illicit activities, but in the ending of what-might-have-been, Mann suggests that life's choices and future happiness might better be served with a clearer moral vision of who we are, what we want, and where we are going.
Gorgeous.......2006-08-20
Mann's masterpiece is an achingly beautiful, exquisitely crafted, spellbinding exploration of beauty, age, love, sex, life, and of course death. I can think of no other book where the setting so effectively establishes the book's atmosphere, so powerfully reinforces its themes and ideas. The plot is so simple, yet wrapped in layers of meaning, both inviting and resisting interpretation.
This book is short yet incredibly rich; it reminds me of a tiny, delicately carved precious jewel. And what a beautiful jewel to dive into and immerse oneself in. Read this book!
Poetic Pedophilia .......2005-11-13
I did not like this book as much as many of the other reviewers. The main problem I had was that I simply could not relate to Aschenbach, the protaganist of the story. I mean, I thought that his obsession with the male child was weird. Unlike Lolita, there was no dark humor in the obsession. There was just a very raw, profound, longing and appreciation for the beauty of the young child. I found that somewhat sick and I cannot say that I've ever had many of the feelings that Aschenbach relates in the work.
Many people seem to think that the most boring part of this book is the part where Aschenbach thinks about his art. Maybe I'm an odd duck, but I actually found this to be the most interesting part of the novella. I like how Aschenbach talks about how he wants to make a name for himself through his art, and about how he wakes up early every morning to pour his soul into his craft. This is the part of the book that I best understood. It really resonated with me.
Even though the story was not my favorite, I must say that I appreciated the author's use of language. The translation I read (by Stanley Applebaum) was lively and captured the author's verbal imagination. I will probably never read this novella again, but I do think that I might like other work by Mann (provided that he is writing about different subject matter!).
I do not know who would really appreciate this book. I guess I would recommend this book largely to people who appreciate art for art's sake, and also to people who like novels which really penetrate the psyche of the main character. Readers less artistically inclined might find this work to be heavy sledding.
Excellent Translation in Dover Edition - Helpful Commentary .......2005-05-30
Death in Venice (1912) is a disturbing story, one that is not easy to forget. It is also exceptional literature, a classic of the twentieth century. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice might be best compared to the subtle, psychologically complex fiction of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In Munich the aging, highly respected author Gustav Aschenbach is in need of change, rest in a new setting, to overcome his growing fatigue that is impacting his writing. While recovering in Venice, Aschenbach slowly, but inexorably, becomes mesmerized by a young Polish boy staying at the seashore with his aristocratic family. Aschenbach is intellectually aware of his growing obsession, but he is seemingly unable to break away. Thomas Mann's somber portrayal of this troubled man is a masterpiece of subtle nuances and psychological intensity.
Thomas Mann's lengthy sentences and complex grammatical structures severely complicate the task of translating Death in Venice. I have read two excellent and yet substantially different translations. The most faithful translation is by Stanley Appelbaum (in this Dover edition, 1995) that tries to be as literal as possible, carefully preserving the comparative length of the original sentences as well as the internal sequence of each original German sentence. Contrastingly, the H. T. Lowe-Porter translation (found elsewhere) is less literal, but is considered the most delightful and readable version, although at the expense of subdividing many of Mann's lengthy sentences. Lowe-Porter's version has been the standard translation for many years.
The Dover edition provides an excellent 10-page commentary, including footnotes.
Zero stars if I could.......2005-01-09
I was a philosophy major in college and I hated this book. But then again, the whole NAMBLA fic genre really doesn't do it for me. I'm sure some literary aesthetes are going to pick this review apart, good for them. I'm incredibly well-read and thought this one was just a tepid bore. Save your time, read some Dostoevsky, some Dickens, some Milton, (...).
Average customer rating:
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A Vintage book
Thomas Mann
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Mann, Thomas
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ASIN: B000874SRG |
Customer Reviews:
Excellent as a textbook.......2006-11-22
I use this book in teaching a Bankruptcy class to California paralegal students. It is an excellent introduction to the bankruptcy system, and includes discussions of both consumer and business bankruptcies (with a definite emphasis on the consumer side). I expecially appreciate the thorough treatment of the BAPA (laws that changed in October 2005).
Average customer rating:
- Specific paralegal advice on building the biz
- Good ideas, good opportunity
- A solid guide with everything the reader needs to know
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How to Start a Bankruptcy Forms Processing Service
Victoria Ring
Manufacturer: Graphico Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Business & Investing
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General
| Small Business & Entrepreneurship
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New Business Enterprises
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Bankruptcy
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Paralegals & Paralegalism
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Bankruptcy
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Paralegals & Paralegalism
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How to Start, Operate and Market a Freelance Notary Signing Agent Business
ASIN: 0976159112 |
Book Description
How to Start a Bankruptcy Forms Processing Business will provide you with the information you need to:
1. Draft documents and electronically file them online with the bankruptcy court.
2. Work with bankruptcy attorneys in any state regardless of where you live in the U.S.
3. Reduce overhead costs for bankruptcy attorneys.
4. Easily earn $20,000 or more per month!
FREE BONUS: Entire set of Client Intake Forms inluded
Victoria Ring was the first bankruptcy paralegal to offer services nationwide through her company, The Lawyer Assistant. The business grew so rapidly that Victoria was unable to maintain it as a one-person operation. When the company was sold to an attorney in Yonkers, NY, Victoria decided to write this book so others could duplicate her efforts and build their own solid buisiness drafting bankruptcy petitions from home. With an average of 4,500 people filing bankruptcy every day, you will be able to cash in on this growing field and save attorneys money when they utilize your services.
This book is also an excellent training manual for paralegals seeking to updgrade their skills as well as attorneys who are just starting a new bankruptcy practice.
Customer Reviews:
Specific paralegal advice on building the biz.......2006-03-19
HOW TO START A BANKRUPTCY FORMS PROCESSING SERVICE is packed with knowledge needed to set up and perform a freelance bankruptcy forms processing service for attorneys: it holds nearly three hundred pages of specific paralegal advice on how to build such a business, provides the knowledge needed to draft the forms and understand how bankruptcy schedules work, and includes instructions on the Chapter 13 plan. Victoria Ring has given seminars and training on her business and these three packages represent the sum of her extensive background and experiences: invaluable training for paralegal efforts.
Good ideas, good opportunity.......2005-10-08
The meat of this info is well written and is a great idea. Gives a good background and she is definately knowlegable. There is a lot of filler, such as how to buy office supplies, etc. I would have liked more marketing info, that is available on a seperate ($$) CD.
A solid guide with everything the reader needs to know.......2004-11-13
Author and paralegal Victoria Ring (one of the first paralegals in the country to set up an internet-based service dedicated to aiding bankruptcy attorneys), How To Start A Bankruptcy Forms Processing Service is a solid guide packed with everything the reader needs to know about improving one's skill as a bankruptcy paralegal or bankruptcy forms processor, and get a freelance bankruptcy forms processing business off the ground. Chapters address the beginning steps of setting up a business from ground zero, including structuring one's client base and selecting the right office supplies, to the nuts and bolts of performing one's jobs, assessing one's clients (for example, recognizing when a debtor could be hiding assets), marketing chapter 13 services to bankruptcy attorneys, managing one's business, tips, tricks, techniques, and insights, and much more. An absolute "must-have" for anyone seeking to organize, promote, or improve the service of their own bankruptcy forms business.
Product Description
What is a Virtual Bankruptcy Assistant? You work from your home office providing valuable services to bankruptcy attorneys nationwide or in your local area. This book provides you with everything you need to start and operate your business. From setting up your office, gathering information from client intake interviews to training you in the skills needed to draft bankruptcy petitions, you can start your career in this highly rewarding field now.
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- Need to locate David L. Buchbinder
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Basic Bankruptcy Law for Paralegals: Forms Manual
David L. Buchbinder
Manufacturer: Aspen Publishers
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0735511969 |
Customer Reviews:
Need to locate David L. Buchbinder.......2000-10-04
Dear David: I hope somehow you get this. I was a client of yours in 1992-3 with my company RNH Enterprises, Inc. I need to ask you a question or two. Hoping to hear from you. Richard
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Bankruptcy: Maneuvering Through the Maze (Clark Boardman Callaghan/Estrin Paralegal Practice Series)
S. Suzanne Walsh
Manufacturer: Delmar Thomson Learning
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Business Law
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Bankruptcy
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ASIN: 0876329814 |
Book Description
This is a coursebook designed for use in a law school level course on Bankruptcy. The authors present their topic through textual notes, edited cases, questions, and problems.
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Bankruptcy evidence manual
Barry Russell
Manufacturer: West Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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Evidence
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ASIN: 0314255079 |
Average customer rating:
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Bankruptcy Evidence Manual, 2006
Manufacturer: Thomson West
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Bankruptcy
| Business
| Law
| Subjects
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ASIN: 0314958487 |
Product Description
* Provides the complete text of the Bankruptcy Code USC Title 11 and related provisions of USC Titles 18 and 28
* Includes Table of Statutes; Table of Court Rules
* Westlaw® Electronic Research Guides and references to West's Key Number System®
* Analyzes topics such as equitable estoppel, judicial estoppel, res judicata, privileges and presumptions, collateral estoppel
* Covers parol evidence, witnesses, opinions, expert testimony, and hearsay
This is an essential guide for planning litigation strategies as well as an excellent quick reference in court. Organized to follow the Federal Rules of Evidence, the text analyzes the rules as they relate to recent bankruptcy cases for a clear understanding of the purpose and application of each rule. The author reviewed thousands of bankruptcy cases and chose more than 200 from jurisdictions across the country to discuss and analyze the specific application of the Federal Rules of Evidence.
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