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Stefan Zweig

A Chess Story

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An epic chess match on a transatlantic liner unearths a story of persecution and obsession. One of the most perfectly gripping novellas from a master of the form, Stefan Zweig. Chess world champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires. 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. But there is another passenger with a passion for chess: Dr B, previously driven to insanity during Nazi imprisonment by the chess games in his imagination. But in agreeing to take on Czentovic, what price will Dr B ultimately pay? A moving portrait of one man's madness, A Chess Story is a searing examination of the power of the mind and the evil it can do.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
This book is currently unavailable
74 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2013
Publication year
2013
Publisher
Pushkin Press
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Quotes

  • Ian Copplehas quoted4 years ago
    a person, an intellectual person who, without going insane and for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, directs his mind’s full analytic force time and again onto the laughable task of backing a wooden king into the angle of a wooden board
  • Ian Copplehas quoted4 years ago
    ancient and yet always new, mechanical in its structure yet animated only by the imagination, limited to a geometrically petrified space yet unlimited in its permutations, always developing yet ever sterile, a logic with no result, a mathematics without calculations
  • Ali Bahramihas quoted5 years ago
    bustle and commotion

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