The Magic Mountain ( illustrated )

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, 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.