Description

By (author) Zweig, Stefan; Translated by Bell Anthea; Translated by Starritt Alexander

Short /annotation
Five of Stefan Zweig”s most powerful novellas, containing some of his most famous and best-loved work.

A casual introduction, a challenge to a simple game of chess, a lovers” reunion, a meaningless infidelity: from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales-meditations on the fragility of love, the limits of obsession, the combustibility of secrets and betrayal.To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing-which, with its unabashed intensity and narrative drive, made him one of the bestselling and most acclaimed authors in the world-is clear and irresistible. Each of these stories is a bolt of experience, unforgettable and unique.

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Vintage Zweig

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Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella-Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov

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Breathtaking … the final sentence [of Burning Secret] is unlike anything I have ever read before

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[A Chess Story is] perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game

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The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig, which I had never read despite a long and ardent admiration of Zweig, includes Burning Secret, about a boy and childish passion, which wrings the heart

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Zweig”s writing is some of the most brilliant of the 20th century. His novellas all begin so innocently. By the time they have ended, you feel he has prised you open, played with your own sympathies, and exposed you to your own imperfect humanity

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A captivating mix…[Zweig] generates momentum out of extremes in thought and feeling, the turbulent negotiations between inner and exterior lives, but he is happiest in mixed feelings, in detecting minute alterations in head and heart

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[Confusion is] a marvellously poised account of misunderstood motives, thwarted love, and sublimated desires

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Vintage Stefan Zweig-[Journey into the Past is] lucid, tender, powerful and compelling

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[Fear is] brilliant, unusual and haunting … Stefan Zweig”s time of oblivion is over for good

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A rediscovery of Zweig through this book gives an enlightening perspective on the past century and how we got where are today… As much in his novellas as in his short stories, the Austrian writer”s psychological acuity brought his protagonists and their dilemmas vividly to life

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Zweig brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of German-speaking central Europe: cultured, humane, but unable to overcome its inner demons and political madness

Biographical note
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family and studied in Berlin and Vienna before making his name as a writer. His passionate, dramatic short stories and gripping biographies of major historical and literary figures, including Beware of Pity and The World of Yesterday,made him one of the most popularwriters in the world in the 1920s and 30s. During these years Zweig travelled widely, enjoying his literary fame and cultivating friendships with many of the great literary figures of his day. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil.

Excerpt
1
The PartnerTHE SHRILL WHISTLE of the locomotive sounded; the train had reached Semmering. For a moment the black carriages stood still in the silvery light of the heights up here, allowing a motley assortment of passengers to get out and others to board the train. Voices were raised in altercation, then the engine u