Book description
Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman Letter from an Unknown
Woman Fantastic Night The Fowler Snared The Invisible Collection
Buchmendel Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman is the story of a
middle-aged English widow who travels to escape loneliness and
boredom. One evening at the Monte Carlo Casino, she becomes mesmerised
by the obsessive gambling of a young Polish aristocrat. This fateful
encounter leads to passion, despair and death, changing their lives
forever. Letter from an Unknown Woman, Zweig's poignant and
heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love. In
1948 it was made into a film by Max Ophuls starring Joan Fontaine. In
The Fowler Snared, it is the man whose passion remains unrequited.
Fantastic Night is the story of an evening that transforms the life of
a rich and bored young man. 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. The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, two
of Zweig's most powerful works, explore lives led in the single minded
pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and corruption.
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 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 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.
