In this magnificent collection of Stefan Zweig's short stories the very best and worst of human nature are captured with sharp observation, understanding and vivid empathy. A knock on a door that forces a whole community to take flight, an aging womaniser who meets his match, a love soured into awful cruelty-these stories present a master at work, at the top of his form. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell
"a comparison between Bell’s English rendering and the original German reveals that she rarely deviates from Zweig’s language—and when she does, it is in pursuit of the aesthetic and psychological spirit of the original over artless mechanical accuracy. . . Zweig is at once the literary heir of Chekhov, Conrad, and Maupassant, with something of Schopenhauer’s observational meditations on psychology thrown in. The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig is a major book of cultural and historical importance, and Pushkin Press has done the literary world a service by releasing it in such an attractive volume." — Okla Elliott, The Harvard Review Online
“What did Zweig have that brought him the fanatical devotion of millions of readers, the admiration of Herman Hesse, the invitation to give the eulogy at the funeral of Sigmund Freud? To learn that, we would have to have a biography that illuminated all aspects of his work, that read all of his books, and that challenged, rather than accepted, the apparent modesty of his statements about his life and work.” – Benjamin Moser, Bookforum
“Amok, a 1922 novella (recently reissued in Pushkin Press’s Collected Stories, translated by Anthea Bell). . . is quintessentially Zweig, masterful in generating suspense, operatically predictable (the woman always dies in Act Four, so the man has a story to tell in Act Five), and drenched in the implicit mores of the day, which Zweig tweaked in his modest fashion by depicting a clean abortion as a better option than a coat hanger. . . . Amok is a compelling story: for its meticulous portrait of the doctor’s emotional process, its compression, and the almost identically sharp observations of gestures, movements, the charged silences in a conversation.” – Gary Indiana, Bookforum
"For far too long, our links with Zweig, all too readily consigned to the dustbin of literary history, have been broken. Pushkin Press’s phenomenal, heartbreaking collection is a reminder that it’s time to forge them again." - Tara Burton, Los Angeles Review of Books
"With each story there is a plea for help, a flicker of hope and an ultimate betrayal." - The New York Daily News
作者简介
1881年,斯特凡·茨威格(Stefan Zweig)出生于维也纳一个富有的奥地利犹太家庭。他在柏林和维也纳学习,最初以诗人和翻译家而闻名,后来成为传记作家。在两次世界大战之间,茨威格成为了国际畅销书作家,他的一系列中篇小说都非常畅销,其中包括《一个陌生女人的来信》(Letter from a Unknown Woman)、《杀人狂》(Amok)和《恐惧》(Fear)。1934年,随着纳粹主义的兴起,他离开了奥地利,在伦敦、巴斯和纽约生活。在这段时间里,他创作了他著名的作品:小说《小心怜悯》和回忆录《昨日的世界》。他最终定居在巴西。1942年,他和妻子被发现殉情。他的大部分作品都可以从普希金出版社找到。
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York—a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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