"I can’t think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as “sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society”- nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into “a sort of human rabies” by an unattainable colonial wife"
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do 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 an apparent double suicide.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lives in Cambridge, England.
TRANSLATED BY Anthea Bell
Cover Illustration 17th c Safavid tile
ISBN 978 1 901 285 66 6
JULIE KAVANAGH Intelligent Life (The Economist)
ABOUT THE BOOK
A DOCTOR IN the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia. In these four stories, Stefan Zweig shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do 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 an apparent double suicide.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lives in Cambridge, England.
TRANSLATED BY Anthea Bell
Cover Illustration 17th c Safavid tile
ISBN 978 1 901 285 66 6
