Book description
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 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. 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.
