Selected Stories - Softcover

Zweig, Stefan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906548226 ISBN 13: 9781906548223

Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2009

Synopsis

Fantastic Night is the story of one transforming evening in the life of a rich and bored young man. He spends a day at the races and an evening in the seedy but thrilling company of the dregs of society. His experiences jolt him out of his languor and give him a newfound relish for life, which is then cut short by the Great War. The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, two of Zweig's most powerful works, explore lives led in the single minded pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and corruption. Letter from an Unknown Woman is a poignant and heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love. This story was made into a film by Max Ophuls starring Joan Fontaine (1948). In The Fowler Snared, it is the man whose passion remains unrequited. Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman is the story of a middle-aged English widow who travels to escape loneliness and boredom. One evening while enjoying the elegant atmosphere of the Monte Carlo Casino, she becomes mesmerised by the obsessive gambling of a young Polish aristocrat. This fateful encounter leads to passion, despair and death, changing their lives forever.

Translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul, Stefan Zweig's Selected Stories is published by Pushkin Press.

About this title

Review

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman is a mini-masterpiece about the fever of addiction and of middle-aged infatuation (Julie Kavanagh The Economist Intelligent Life)

Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella - Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov - of whom he was in awe. He was formidably well read, but in his fiction he is as much at ease with the unlettered as the learned... Stefan Zweig cherished the everyday imperfections and frustrated aspirations of the men and women he analysed with such affection and understanding (Paul Bailey Times Literary Supplement)

About the Author

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1906548226
• ISBN 13: 9781906548223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256