'Death in Venice' is the story of an ageing writer's obsession with a young boy. The man is so distracted by the boy that he fails to pay attention to rumours of disease spreading through the city. The six other stories in this collection include 'The Joker', 'Gladius Dei', 'Little Herr Friedemann' and 'The Road to the Churchyard'.

This story of a prosperous Hanseatic family and their gradual disintegration is also a portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the 19th century to a modern uncertainty.

This is the story of Adrian Leverkuhn, whose extraordinary career is charted, from his precocious childhood to his tragic death. His revelation of the horrifying price he had to pay for his achievement highlights Mann's vast theme: the discord between genius and sanity.

An extraordinary collection of stories from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the title story, one of Mann's most political, explores the rise of facism by way of a mysterious magician in a small Italian vollage.
In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Thomas Mann uses settings as diverse as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East to explore a theme which always preoccupied him: the two faces of things. Thus, in "A Man and His Dog" and "Disorder and Early Sorrow," small domestic tempests become symbolic of the discordant muddle of humanity. In "The...

This is a study of decadence among the merchant families of Hamburg at the end of the 19th century. The novel is based on Mann's own experience as the son of a German merchant prince, but goes beyond his own experience in its sweep.

With 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 World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of...