Death in Venice and Other Stories [Paperback]

This superb translation ofDeath in Veniceand six other stories by Thomas Mann is a tour de force, deserving to be the definitive text for English-speaking readers. These seven stories represent Mann’s early writing career and a level of literary quality Mann himself despaired of ever again matching. In these stories he began to grapple with themes that were to recur throughout his work. InLittle Herr Friedemann,a character’s carefully structured way of life is suddenly threatened by an unexpected sexual passion. InGladius Dei,puritanical intellect clashes with beauty. InTristan,Mann presents an ironic and comic account of the tension between an artist and bourgeois society.

All seven of these stories are accomplished and memorable, but it isDeath in Venicethat truly forms the centerpiece of the collection. The themes that Mann weaves through the shorter pieces come to a climax in this stunning novella, one of the most hauntingly magnificent tales of art and self-destruction ever written.Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel,Buddenbrooks, was published. 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). Thomas Mann died in 1955.Chapter One


It was the nurse's fault. In vain Frau Consul Friedemann, when the matter was first suspected, had solemnly urged her to relinquish so heinous a vice; in vain she had dispensed to her daily a glass of red wine in addition to her nourishing stout. It suddenly came to light that the girl had actually sunk so low as to drink the methylated spirits intended for the coffee machine; and before a replacement for her had arrived, before she couldl£"