Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann | 
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years
by Thomas Mann | 
Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann | 
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse | 
Joseph and His Brothers
by Thomas Mann | 
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann | 
The Flounder
by Gunter Grass | 
Beneath the Wheel
by Hermann Hesse | 
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke | 
Demian
by Hermann Hesse | 
The Clown
by Heinrich Boll | 
Narcissus and Goldmund
by Hermann Hesse | 
The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse | 
The Holy Sinner
by Thomas Mann | 
The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass | 
Narziss and Goldmund
by Hermann Hesse | 
The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil | 
The Sleepwalkers
by Hermann Broch | 
The Stranger
by Albert Camus | 
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera |
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 work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.