This collection contains two of Thomas Mann’s classic works.

The novella Death in Venice (1912) is the story of a famous writer who becomes obsessed by a handsome youth on a visit to Venice. While cholera spreads through the city, the older man stalks the youngster and his family.

The sprawling novel of ideas The Magic Mountain (1924) is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the years before the First World War. The many layers of this work includes a bildungsroman, a modernist text, a comedy of manners, and an allegory of pre-war Europe. The Magic Mountain won Thomas Mann the Nobel prize for literature in 1929.