The Magic Mountain
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic • Acclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann’s masterpiece, presented here in a stunning hardcover edition.
With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps—a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War.
To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a…