Death in Venice

"Well-known for his superb translations of Czech and Russian literature, especially Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Michael Henry Heim is just as good working from German; his translation is crisp and deft, and it skillfully conveys the detached yet terrible momentum of the story."—New York Sun

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."