Death in Venice, novella by Thomas Mann, published in German as Der Tod in Venedig in 1912. A symbol-laden story of aestheticism and decadence, Mann’s best-known novella exemplifies the author’s regard for Sigmund Freud’s writings on the unconscious. Gustav von Aschenbach is a revered author whose work is known for its discipline and formal perfection.

'All his powers were in decline; the only thing growing stronger in him was the conviction that all this could not last much longer, that his demise was imminent.' The Buddenbrooks (1900) was Thomas Mann's first major success. It draws on his own family history and on his vivid memories of growing up in the commercial town of Lübeck in North Germany. The narrative traces the decline of a wealthy, established merchant family, from their height during the last decad...

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The GuardianWith this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First...

To unlock his full creative potential, Adrian Leverkühn makes a lethal pact with nature and intentionally contracts syphilis.A brilliant young composer, Adrian believes that the disease-induced madness will fuel his genius. But while his music reaches new heights, his mind and morality begin to unravel. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall.

Thomas Mann was the 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. Death in Venice, this tale of forbidden love which has long intrigued the reading public, was his early masterpiece.

"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece." -The New Yorker"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods." -The New RepublicThomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonis...

'The greatest German novelist of the 20th century' Spectator'A supremely gifted storyteller' New YorkerThree of the finest stories by a giant of European literature, collected in a beautiful editionThis triptych of stories represents some of the finest work by the great German master, Thomas Mann. From a classic early account of artistic formation, suffused with deep melancholy, to works that explo...

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation‘Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing’It is summer time in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans h...

Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger tells of a man who belongs nowhere. The son of a Lübeck merchant and a mother with an artistic temperament, Tonio lives between two worlds: drawn to the clean, ordinary life that never quite opens to him, and uneasy among artists whose poses he can't fully trust. The story follows Tonio from schoolroom longing into adulthood, where his gifts become both his vocation and his distance from other people. He becomes a writer — successful, observant, and solitary — wa...

The fairy-tale masterpiece of modernist literature, in a landmark new translation.Thomas Mann’s supreme achievement, The Magic Mountain is a novel of astonishing philosophical complexity and formal brilliance. Sometimes forgotten is that it is also, at its heart, an emotionally resonant fairy-tale. Its guileless hero, a “simple young fellow” named Hans Castorp, travels to a snowbound Swiss sanatorium where an eclectic cast of characters spends their days d...

'impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and yet sacred, still honourable, even here: "I love you!"' This volume contains a generous selection of the short fiction Thomas Mann published in the years 1897 to 1912, after which he turned to larger-scale projects. The acknowledged classic among the early shorter fiction is the novella Death in Venice, in which Mann develops a lyrical style and a range of mythological allusions, through the forbidden love of a mid...