Stefan Zweig

'Thoughtful, highly observant, and humane' GuardianTwo thousand years of human struggleFive tales of family breakdown, political struggle, and monomaniacal obsession from one of the defining voices of the European Jewish diaspora. Moving back through time from the First World War to Ancient Rome, these stories play on the tension between religion, society and individual with masterful irony. We encounter heroes and bookworms, visionaries and gadabouts, patriarchs and rebels - united across the centuries by faith, and by the intensity with which they live and die, their individual passions blazing out against the forces of history.Includes:'Buchmendel''Downfall of the Heart''The Miracles of Life''In the Snow''The Buried Candelabrum'Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.Translated by Anthea Bell and Eden and Cedar Paul.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 translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying 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.Anthea Bell (1936-2018) was one of the leading literary translators of her time. Her work from German, French and Danish into English encompassed the writings of Kafka, Freud, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Georges Simenon, W.G. Sebald, René Goscinny, and more - including many translations of the work of Stefan Zweig for Pushkin Press.Eden Paul (1865-1944) and Cedar Paul (1880-1972) together translated dozens of books from French, German, Italian and Russian during their thirty years of marriage. Among them were writings on psychoanalysis and socialist thought, as well as many of the works of Stefan Zweig.

'Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game' Economist'Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella - Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov' Paul Bailey, TLSChess champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires. Dull-witted in all but chess, he entertains himself on board by allowing others to challenge him in the game, before beating each of them and taking their money. But there is another passenger with a passion for chess: Dr B, previously driven to insanity during Nazi imprisonment by the games played in his imagination. In agreeing to take on Czentovic, what price will Dr B ultimately pay?Stark, intense, overpowering, A Chess Story is a grandmaster's examination of madness and the power of a mind willing to sacrifice everything to win.Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.Translated by Alexander Starritt.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 translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying 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.Alexander Starritt is the author of the novels We Germans and The Beast. His translations of The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man by Franz Kafka and Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler are also published by Pushkin Press.