Chess – A Novel by Stefan Zweig
Chess by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell / ISBN 9780241630822 / 116-page hardback from Penguin
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A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd – a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig’s acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of the past.
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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 Chess (1942), but his most outstanding accomplishments were his many biographies, which were based on psychological interpretation.
