Stefan Zweig

"Five of Stefan Zweig's most compelling novellas are presented together in this volume for the first time. Fantastic Night is the story of one transforming evening in the life of a rich and bored young man. Letter from an Unknown Woman is a poignant and heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love; in The Fowler Snared, it is the man whose passion remains unrequited. The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel explore lives led in the single-minded pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and war."--BOOK JACKET.

Ben shu jiang shu yi wei zhu ming de xiao shuo jia lü xing gui lai, yi wai shou dao yi feng mo sheng de xin, xie xin zhe shi yi ge bu zhi ming de nü ren, zai zhe feng jue bie xin li, zhe ge mo sheng nü ren xiang xiao shuo jia su shuo le zi ji de yi sheng, biao lu zi ji dui xiao shuo jia zhi mi bu hui de ai lian, zai shao nü de xin mu zhong, xiao shuo jia shi yi ge wan mei wu que de ren. ...

"Based upon his own impressions of Brazil and personal experiences there, the author portrays a vast, inviting, fertile land with seemingly endless resources; a history devoid of major wars, in which all conflicts are resolved in a spirit of conciliation; the type of society for which he himself longed, composed of multinational elements that combine to form a harmonious whole free of racial tensions, strife, and destructive tendencies." "All of these and more contribute to his vision of an almost utopian place that seems to stand apart from the ills of the modern world while providing refuge from its hostility and hope that mankind can find a more peaceful direction in the future."--Jacket.

In the first major English biography of Honore de Balzac for over fifty years, Graham Robb has produced a compelling portrait of the great French novelist whose powers of creation were matched only by his self-destructive tendencies. As colorful as the world he described, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography: a relentless seducer whose successes were as spectacular as his catastrophes; a passionate collector, inventor, explorer, and political campaigner; a mesmerizing storyteller with the power to make his fantasies come true. Balzac's early life was a struggle against literary disappointment and poverty, and he learned his trade by writing a series of lurid commercial novels. Robb shows how Balzac's craving for wealth, fame, and happiness produced a series of hare-brained entrepreneurial schemes which took him to the remotest parts of Europe and into a love affair with a Polish countess whom he courted for fifteen years by correspondence. Out of these experiences emerged some of the finest novels in the Realist tradition. Skillfully interweaving the life with the novels, Robb presents Balzac as one of the great tragi-comic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been, and still is, immense.