Description

A magnificent city is touched by disease. An ageing writer is blinded by desire.

Thomas Mann’s haunting collection gathers seven stories of desire, repression and self-deception.

Ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach is on holiday in Venice when he notices a fellow guest in the foyer of his hotel: an exceptionally beautiful boy staying there with his family.

Admiration gives way to obsession as Aschenbach’s days begin to revolve around seeing the boy. Meanwhile, ominous signs point to disease spreading through the magnificent but decaying city. Blinded by his fixation, Aschenbach fails to recognise the danger around him.

In these seven stories, Mann returns again and again to the private life beneath the public self. The result is a collection of European classics marked by elegance, moral tension and haunting psychological depth.

A classic collection of literary stories, Death in Venice And Other Stories is ideal for readers drawn to European classics, psychological fiction and haunting studies of beauty, obsession and moral disintegration.

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Publisher Review

"The real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration...A deep and highly complex drama of the psyche" * Financial Times * "This complex fin-de-siecle masterpiece...seems eerily to pre-echo the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself" * The Times * "Thomas Mann's story of obsession and spiritual malaise" * Observer * "What Mann understands and laughs at, though it grips him, is the quasi-sexual attraction of beauty and philosophy...Death in Venice is one of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature" * Independent * "Mann's obsessive story explores the complex, haunted relationship between an ageing writer and a beautiful Polish boy" * Express *