Short Stories/Novellas

A stunning new edition of a darkly “touching and delightful” tale of seduction, jealousy, and betrayal from the master of the novella ( The New York Times ) Bored on holiday at an Austrian mountain resort, the suave Baron takes a fancy to twelve-year-old Edgar’s mother. But when his initial advances are rejected, he must turn to other means to carry out his seduction. Instead, he lavishes his attention on Edgar, deploying all of his adult charms and wiles to befriend the boy and get closer to the woman he desires. The initially unsuspecting child soon senses something is amiss, but he has no idea of the burning secret that is driving the affair—and that it will soon change his life forever. Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

A new pocket edition of this Conradian tale of maddening desire, from the master of the novella On a sweltering ocean-liner travelling from India to Europe a passenger tells his story: the tale of a doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his duty and the pull of his emotions; a tale of power and desire, pride and shame and a headlong flight into folly. This is one the most intense and incisive of the novellas which brought Stefan Zweig to worldwide fame.

This story of distorted passion and behaviour reveals the unrequited love of a woman for a man who cares so little for her that he fails to recognize her as she obsessively pursues him. Also included is "The Fowler Snared", sharing a similar theme, only it is the man whose passion is unrequited.

This classic Austrian novella paints a deeply moving portrait of a woman whose quest for passion and purpose comes at a steep price The less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly. So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C—recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion of a desperate stranger, she discovers a purpose once again but at what cost? In this vivid and moving tale of a compassionate woman, and her defining experience, Zweig explores the power of intense love, overwhelming loneliness and regret that can last for a lifetime.

A psychological cat and mouse hunt.... The brief, loveless affair between a bourgeois woman and a concert pianist leads to a vortex of terror, beset by danger, blackmail and fear... "...Yet finally she was at her own front steps, stumbling towards them. As she pulled open the door, her husband was standing there, a knife in his hand, staring at her, his eyes boring into her. “Where have you been?” he asked dully, “Nowhere,” she heard herself reply. A harsh guffaw sounded at her side. “I saw it all! I saw it!” the grinning woman shrieked, giggling maniacally. Her husband raised the knife. “Help!” she shouted. “Help…!”" "Fear" is an enduringly popular novella by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. The story was adapted into a 1928 silent film "Angst" directed by Hans Steinhoff and a 1954 film "Fear" / "La Paura" directed by Roberto Rossellini. This is a new translation by Nicholas Stephens, who has previously translated Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story," also available on the Kindle. REVIEWS A brilliant writer (New York Times) One of the joys of recent years is the translation into English of Stefan Zweig's stories (Edmund de Waal) Stefan Zweig was a late and magnificent bloom from the hothouse of fin de siecle Vienna (The Wall Street Journal) Zweig is one of the masters of the short story and novella, and by 'one of the masters' I mean that he's up there with Maupassant, Chekhov, James, Poe, or indeed anyone you care to name (Nick Lezard Guardian) A new favourite writer of mine (Wes Anderson) BIOGRAPHY Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian writer who, at the height of his fame in the 1920s and 30s, was one of the most famous authors in the world. Zweig was born into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family in Vienna, where he attended school and university before continuing his studies on Berlin. A devotee of Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, he had published his first book of poetry by the age of 19. After taking a pacifist stance during the First World War he travelled widely and became an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. He also developed friendships with great writers, thinkers and artists of the day, including Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arturo Toscanini and, perhaps most importantly, Sigmund Freud, whose philosophy had a great influence on Zweig’s work. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London. There he began proceedings for the divorce of his first wife Frederika, whom he had left for his secretary Lotte Altmann, a young German-Jewish refugee. In London he also wrote his only novel – his most famous and arguably greatest work, Beware of Pity – before moving to Bath, where, with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he and Lotte took British citizenship. With the German occupation of France in 1940, Zweig, a committed pacifist and advocate of European integration, was devastated. “Europe is finished, our world destroyed,” he wrote. Zweig and Lotte married and left Europe for New York, before finally settling in Petrópolis, Brazil, where in 1942 the couple were found dead in an apparent double suicide.

This is the story of about the strangest thing that I've ever encountered, old art dealer that I am.' It is perhaps the finest art collection of its kind, acquired through a lifetime of sacrifice - but when a dealer comes to see it, he finds something quite unexpected, and is drawn into a peculiar deception of the collector himself... Stefan Zweig was a wildly popular writer of compelling short fiction: in this collection there are peaks of extraordinary emotion, stories of all that is human crushed by the movements of history, of letters that fill a young heart or drive a person towards death, of obsession and desire. They will stay with the reader for ever.

'... a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!' A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd - a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of genius.

A deep study of the uneasy heart by one of the masters of the psychological novel, Journey into the Past , published here for the first time in America, is a novella that was found among Zweig’s papers after his death. Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything—time, war, betrayal—can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. His love is returned, and the couple vow to live together, but then Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico, and while he is there the First World War breaks out. With travel and even communication across the Atlantic shut down, Ludwig makes a new life in the New World. Years later, however, he returns to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?