FIVE OF STEFAN ZWEIG'S most compelling novellas are presented together in this powerful volume.
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.
Fantastic Night is joined by
The Invisible Collection and
Buchmendel, two of Zweig's most powerful works, which explore lives led in the single minded pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and corruption. And finally,
Letter from an Unknown Woman, Zweig's poignant and heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love and
The Fowler Snared, in which it is the man whose passion remains unrequited, complete the collection.
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 Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt
Cover illustration by William Turner of Oxford (1789-1862)
ISBN 1 901285 545 • 368pp
“Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella – Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov – of whom he was in awe.”
PAUL BAILEY -
Times Literary Supplement
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