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 the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental wor[...]
The novella was Schmidt's preferred form at the beginning of his writing career, and this volume collects the ten novellas he wrote between Entymesis (1949) and Republica Intelligentsia (1957). The settings range from ancient Greece to 21st-Century America, but all react to the stifling conservati[...]