The Tables of the Law

The Tables of the Law

Title: The Tables of the Law
Author: Thomas Mann
Release: 2014-11-09
Kind: ebook
Genre: Literary Fiction, Books, Fiction & Literature
Size: 318801
NEWLY TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY MARION FABER AND STEPHEN LEHMANN

AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL WOOD
"Beautiful…one of the best short novels he has written." —New York Times Book Review

"Can rank with the best of Mann's writing" —Boston Globe

* * *

"His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and holiness—the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure."

Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law, the Nobel Prize winner's retelling of the prophet's life. Invited in 1943 to write this story as a defense of the Decalogue, Mann reveals how strange and forbidding Moses' task was. As "the Lawgiver"—endowed with the wrists and hands of a stonemason—engraves the tablets, so he hews the souls of his people:

"Into the stone of the mountain I carved the ABC of human behavior,but it shall also be carved into your flesh and blood, Israel…"

Mann's tale of the ethical founding and molding of a people sharply rebukes the Nazis for their intended destruction of the moral code set down in the Ten Commandments. But does his famous irony and authorial license mock or enhance the Biblical account of the shaping of the Jewish people? You know the Bible story. Now read Mann's version—it will grip you anew.

"Brilliant…a little masterpiece" —Chicago Sun Book Week

"Magnificent…one of the greatest bits of writing which one of the world's greatest writers has ever given us" —Chicago Herald-American

"Brilliant…one of those splendid novelettes which in this reviewer's opinion represent the very essence of Mr. Mann's literary art" —Saturday Review of Literature

Thomas Mann's many works include Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Joseph and His Brothers, and Confessions of Felix Krull. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann co-authored a biography of the pianist Rudolf Serkin and have together translated Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

More Books from Thomas Mann

Upton Sinclair, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Rebecca West, H. G. Wellls, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Rabindranath Tagore, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Bram Stoker, Sir Walter Scott & Jack London
Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, G. K. Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Lucy Maud Montgomery, EDGAR ALLAN POE, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, William Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, George Sand, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Leo Tolstoy & Bram Stoker
James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, EDGAR ALLAN POE, Bram Stoker, Leo Tolstoy, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Stendhal, Rabindranath Tagore, Jack London, Mary Shelley, George Sand, William Somerset Maugham, Walter Scott, Upton Sinclair, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift & Rebecca West
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann & Joachim Neugroschel
Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Kate Chopin, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, George Eliot, Stephen Crane, Thomas Mann, Alexander Pushkin, Voltaire, Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gustave Flaubert & Jules Verne
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann, Bayard Quincy Morgan, Igor Kogan & Zelenska Tatiana
Damion Searls & Thomas Mann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Heine, The Brothers Grimm, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Ilse Frapan, Martin Suter, Peter Stamm, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll, Helene Stökl, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph Roth, Peter Rosegger, Wolfdietrich Schnurre & Ernst Anschütz
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Rabindranath Tagore, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, George Sand, W. Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Thomas Mann, May Sinclair & Rebecca West
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann & Michael Neumann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann, Jefferson P. Chase & Martin Swales
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann