Chess: A Novel

Description

Stefan Zweig's classic novella of obsession, madness and chess In 1941 a cruise ship is heading to Buenos Aires, and on board a group of eager passengers challenge the reigning world chess champion to a match. At first they lose pitifully, until a kind stranger aids by whispering instructions to them - he is a masterful chess player, and as they play, the game itself draws the stranger closer and closer to its secrets. Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of the cost of obsession, set in a Central Europe traumatized by the psychological influence of Nazism.

Stefan Zweig (Author) 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. In 1934, with Nazism entrenched, Zweig left Austria for England, and became a British citizen in 1940. In 1941 he and his second wife went to Brazil, where they committed suicide. Zweig's best-known works of fiction are Beware of Pity (1939) and The Royal Game (1944), but his most outstanding accomplishments were his many biographies, which were based on psychological interpretation.

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 Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game -- Economist His great achievement in short form * The Times *