"Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game. Never mind that you may have never moved a pawn to King four; the story will grip you"
The Economist (about The Royal Game)
"The novella is one of Zweig's most horrifying investigations into monomania and at the same time an aprable of the dangers inherent in engaging with nazism"
"The novella is one of Zweig's most horrifying investigations into monomania and at the same time an aprable of the dangers inherent in engaging with nazism"
RUTH FRANKLIN London Review of Books (about The Royal Game)
"Not long after finishing his memoir (The World of Yesterday), Zweig and his second wife Charlotte Altmann sailed from New York for Brazil. The liner provided him with the setting for his last novella, a brilliant story entitled The Royal Game, in which a brutally competent world chess champion is challenged by an "amateur" who has learned chess as an accidental survival strategy while enduring Nazi interrogation in Vienna" PATRICK WRIGHT The Guardian
"Not long after finishing his memoir (The World of Yesterday), Zweig and his second wife Charlotte Altmann sailed from New York for Brazil. The liner provided him with the setting for his last novella, a brilliant story entitled The Royal Game, in which a brutally competent world chess champion is challenged by an "amateur" who has learned chess as an accidental survival strategy while enduring Nazi interrogation in Vienna" PATRICK WRIGHT The Guardian
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Royal Game takes place on a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, where a tantalising encounter takes place between the reigning world chess champion and an unknown passenger. The stranger’s diffident manner masks his extraordinary ability to challenge the Grand Master in a game of chess, but also conceals his dark and damaged past, the horror of which emerges as the game unfolds.
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 poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed 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.
TRANSLATED BY B W Huebsch
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 poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed 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.
TRANSLATED BY B W Huebsch
ISBN 978 1 901285 11 6
96pp
