This volume includes wonderful examples of the long tradition of storytelling, and even more revelatory in regard to Mann's themes and styles. (This collection) "provides an extraordinary insight into the changes that were taking place on the European literary scene in the 1890s, as the decadence and fatigue of the fin-de-siecle was giving way to an energetic post-Nietzschean modernism."

"La muerte en Venecia" es la historia de Gustavo Von Aschenbach, un veterano y gran artista, pero que en el fondo, era un alma agotada, capaz de sobrevivir sólo en el artificio, que de pronto descubre la belleza espontánea que se manifiesta sin esfuerzos y sin titubeos en la figura angelical de un adolescente polaco. Todo empieza cuando Aschenbach, tras sufrir una crisis creativa, llega al hotel Lido de Venecia para pasar una temporada de vacaciones...

TV movie version of the opera about an aging writer who becomes obsessed with a handsome young boy.

A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting...

"When World War I broke out the author of ''Buddenbrooks'' was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...