Death in Venice

Mann's bestselling work of fiction now appears in a trade paperback format with a striking new jacket. Sales of the classic have totaled over 800,000 copies and average 42,000 copies a year.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was from Germany. At the age of 25, he published his first novel,Buddenbrooks. In 1924,The Magic Mountainwas published, and five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wroteDoctor Faustus(first published in the United States in 1948).

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim
Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."