The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

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



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, Zweig 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.Anthea Bell (1936-2018) ranked among the leading literary translators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work from German, French and Danish into English encompassed the writings of Kafka, Freud, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Georges Simenon, W.G. Sebald, René Goscinny, Cornelia Funke and many others. Her translations for Pushkin Press of Stefan Zweig have reintroduced to English-language readers the work of one of the most popular European authors of the interwar period. She won numerous literary awards, some of them several times, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.