FICTION

THE ROYAL GAME
AND OTHER STORIES

Stefan Zweig gained early fame as a poet, translator, and biographer. When he added fiction to his repertoire, his work was critically acclaimed. However, Zweig has fallen into an undeserved obscurity, and unlike the works of his contemporaries and admirers--fellow Austrian and German writers such as Thomas Man, Herman Hesse, and Sigmund Freud--Zweig's writings have become almost completely unavailable to the English-speaking audience.

The Royal Game and Other Stories is a collection of five of his brilliant creative achievements, revives Zweig's art, making it once again available to a wide range of readers.

Spanning his entire career, the stories included—"The Royal Game," "Amok," "Letter from an Unknown Woman," "The Burning Secret," and "Fear"—each reveal an individual's passionate response to life. Toying with the theme of the mind left to itself, Zweig gives the reader everything from the story of a child's distrust of his mother to one of a man driven to insanity by his imaginary chess games.

Zweig's enormous interest in psychology and psychological problems combine with early century settings to provide compelling stories that prove Zweig to be a master of psychological narrative.

Through the years, the stories of Stefan Zweig have been hailed as intense and memorable psychological thrillers—adventures of the mind—with wide, universal appeal. The five masterpieces in this book reveal why Zweig has earned such praise, and should help his legacy continue on to a new generation of readers.

“The five stories, which span his career are sophisticated and suspenseful psychological portraits, reflecting the intellectual culture of prewar Germany.”
—Publishers Weekly

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna to a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. Recognition as a writer came early for Zweig; by the age of forty, he had already won literary fame. Zweig traveled widely, and living in Salzburg between the wars, he made friends with the greats: Bruno Walter, Romain Rolland, Toscanini, Sigmund Freud. In 1934, with Nazism entrenched, Zweig left Austria for England, and became a British citizen in 1940. Two years later, after relocating in Brazil, he became pathologically depressed over the state of world affairs and took his own life.