The Royal Game & 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 Mann, 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.