Dull-witted in all but chess, he entertains himself on board by allowing others to challenge him in the game, before beating each of them and taking their money. Chess world champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires. One of the most perfectly gripping novellas from a master of the form, Stefan Zweig. He wrote Schnitzlers Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914.An epic chess match on a transatlantic liner unearths a story of persecution and obsession. Peter Gay is Director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. New York Review Books has published Zweigs novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novella Chess Story. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe, and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. Ruth Franklin, London Review of Books About the Author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. Herbert Gorman, The New York Times Book Review His writing reveals his sympathy for fellow human beings. Barthold Fles, The New Republic Zweig possesses a dogged psychological curiosity, a brutal frankness, a supreme impartiality. mediums his subtlety of style, his profound psychological knowledge and his inherent humaneness. Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books Always remains essentially the same, revealing in all. the case history here is no longer that of individuals it is the case history of Europe. He has achieved the very considerable feat of inventing, in his description of the game of chess, a metaphor for the terribly grim game he is playing with his Nazi tormentors.

Review Quotes writer who understands perfectly the life he is describing, and who has great analytic gifts. This new translation of Chess Story brings out the works unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweigs story. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological. Book Synopsis Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweigs final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942.

Chess story stefan zweig