Happy July! Calendar time!
If this is the first time you're hearing about this, these calendar wallpapers are a fun monthly project I cooked up for myself and is a sneaky way of promoting the Read the Nobels Reading Challenge for 2016. I select an author who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, a book cover, and a quote.
About Thomas Mann
This prolific German author attracted attention with this win because the Nobel is typically usually awarded for an entire body of work and not just one work. The novel Buddenbrooks,* published in 1901, is a family story inspired by Mann's own background as a north German merchant family.
He is known for his symbolic and ironic fictional works, which have insight into the artistic and intellectual psychology. He drew inspiration from German and Biblical stories, and the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
I am featuring his book The Magic Mountain*, a coming of age story, because I have had it on my TBR for a while now. It has so many quotable quotes that I feel it has much wisdom to impart. Here's a synopsis which I have no doubt will whet your appetite for more Mann:
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
Mann's other notable works include: Death in Venice*, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus*.
Have you read any of Mann's work?
More links about Thomas Mann:
More links about Thomas Mann:
- Nobel Prize - Bibliography
- Wikipedia
- Books by Jelinek that have been reviewed on Read the Nobels blog
Go ahead and download this month's wallpaper!
* Affiliate links
Author Photo: Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Past wallpapers:
- June wallpaper: featured 2004 Laureate Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher*
- May wallpaper: featured 1968 Laureate Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness*
- April wallpaper: featured 1909 Laureate Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils*
- March wallpaper: featured 1907 Laureate Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book*
- February wallpaper: featured 2013 Laureate Alice Munro's Runaway*
- January wallpaper : featured the first edition cover and a quote from 1982 Laureate Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude*
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