Amok

by Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell (Translator)

Overview

A new pocket edition of this Conradian tale of maddening desire, from the master of the novella

On a sweltering ocean-liner travelling from India to Europe a passenger tells his story: the tale of a doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his duty and the pull of his emotions; a tale of power and desire, pride and shame and a headlong flight into folly.

This is one the most intense and incisive of the novellas which brought Stefan Zweig to worldwide fame.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782274605
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	06/26/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 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. Between the wars, Zweig 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 left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled 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.

Editorial Reviews

'I can't think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as "sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society"- nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into "a sort of human rabies" by an unattainable colonial wife.' - Julie Kavanagh, Economist Intelligent Life

'To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires. (...) These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that make Zweig's work so sympathetically acute.' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

From the Publisher