Married to Stefan Zweig
Married to Stefan Zweig

Author: Friderike Zweig

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13:

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An essential companion piece to Stefan Zweig's classic The World of Yesterday, this memoir addresses many of the questions that this internationally celebrated author raised but did not answer. A professional journalist and researcher in her own right who first encountered Zweig in 1908, Friderike threads her story between what Zweig called the Scylla of "exaggerated candor" and the Charybdis of self-love. She paints a detailed portrait of her famous husband from his birth into a wealthy Jewish family in late 19th century Vienna to his suicide (with his second wife) in Brazil in 1942. Married to Stefan Zweig, first published in 1946 under the title Stefan Zweig, provides a thorough overview of the writer's poems, plays, stories, biographies, essays and articles, his work habits, and his relations with editors, publishers, friends, mentors and protégés. Friderike also illuminates facets of the tumultuous context of political and social upheaval in which Zweig worked during his years in Salzburg and London. Married to Stefan Zweig is among the very small number of women’s memoirs from 20th century Central Europe and an unusual portrait of a marriage anywhere, anytime.

The World of Yesterday
The World of Yesterday

Author: Stefan Zweig

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2013-08-06

Total Pages: 295

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Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

Balzac
Balzac

Author: Stefan Zweig

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2019-08-09

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13:

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Zweig devoted ten years of research and writing to Balzac, which he regarded as his crowning achievement. This late work reads like a picaresque novel, with Balzac’s quest for “a woman with a fortune” and recurrent episodes of the author chasing an elusive pot of gold driving the story. This biography of one classic author by another is filled with Zweig’s characteristic psychological insights. He portrays the energy and “exuberance of imagination” that produced some two thousand characters in La comédie humaine, as well as the daily details of the coffee-chugging writer’s life, his manic writing schedule, method of correcting proofs, dealing with publishers and reviewers, signing contracts, doing marketing and publicity. Balzac blends biography and literary history in a highly readable volume that will teach you French cultural history as you laugh out loud. “[Balzac] is sure to entertain, instruct and charm ... It is a work of art, ... alive with the teeming life of its model ... It is true both to facts and to the more elusive psychological and spiritual truth of a man who ... has remained one of the most mysterious of great creators.” – Henri Peyre, Sterling professor of French Literature, Yale University, The New York Times

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman

Author: Stefan Zweig

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2019-08-09

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13:

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Originally published in 1932 and for decades since one of Stefan Zweig’s most popular biographies, this “portrait of an average woman,” betrothed at fourteen, crowned queen at nineteen, and beheaded at thirty-seven, aimed “not to deify, but to humanize.” Supplementing library and archival research with psychological insight,Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is a vivid narrative of France’s most famous queen, her relations with her mother Empress Maria Theresa, her husband Louis XVI, and her lover Swedish Count von Fersen, set against the backdrop of the French and Austrian courts of the ancien régime, the French Revolution and the Terror. “... the biography to end all biographies on Marie Antoinette ... [Zweig's book] possesses all the qualities of the excellent biography — directness, frankness, full exposition, picturesqueness, characterization, color and delectable readableness.” —The New York Times “Powerful, magnificent, poignant…” — The New Republic “A stupendous and superb piece of work.” — Chicago Daily Tribune