Fantastic Night Other Stories

Download or read book Fantastic Night & Other Stories written by Stefan Zweig and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FIVE OF STEFAN ZWEIG'S most compelling novellas are presented together in this powerful volume. Fantastic Night is the story of one transforming evening in the life of a rich and bored young man. He spends a day at the races and an evening in the seedy but thrilling company of the dregs of society. His experiences jolt him out of his languor and give him a newfound relish for life, which is then cut short by the Great War. Fantastic Night is joined by The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, two of Zweig's most powerful works, which explore lives led in the single minded pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and corruption. And finally, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Zweig's poignant and heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love and The Fowler Snared, in which it is the man whose passion remains unrequited, complete the collection.

Download or read book Demons of the Night written by Joan C. Kessler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-04-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of thrillers and chillers from 19th Century France. In Theophile Gautier's The Dead in Love, a man develops an obsessive passion for a woman who has returned from the grave, while Honore de Balzac's The Red Inn is on a crime which is committed by one person in thought and another in deed.

Download or read book The Night Counter written by Alia Yunis and published by Crown. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An immigrant-ethnic cocktail laced with political oppression, but before shaking, [Alia Yunis] adds Scheherazade, the fabled storyteller who kept herself alive by distracting her tyrannical husband for a thousand and one nights." --Carolyn See, Washington Post After 85 years, Fatima knows that she is dying because for the last 991 days she has been visited by the immortal storyteller from The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade. Just as Scheherazade spun magical stories for 1,001 nights to save her own life, Fatima has spent each night telling Scheherazade her life stories. But with only nine days left before her death, Fatima has a few loose ends to tie up. She must find a wife for her openly gay grandson, teach Arabic (and birth control) to her 17-year-old great-granddaughter, make amends with her estranged husband, and decide which of her troublesome children should inherit her family's home in Lebanon--a house she herself has not seen in nearly 70 years. Fatima’s children are spread far apart and are wrapped up in their own chaotic lives seemingly disinterested in their mother and their inheritances. But as she weaves stories of her husband, children, and grandchildren, Fatima brings together a family that is both capricious and steadfast, affectionate and also smothering, connected yet terribly alone. Taken all together, they present a striking and surprising tapestry of modern Arab American life. Shifting between America and Lebanon over the last hundred years, Alia Yunis crafts a bewitching debut novel imbued with great humanity, imagination, family drama and a touch of magic realism. Be prepared to feel utterly charmed.

Download or read book The World of Yesterday written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Governess and Other Stories written by Stefan Zweig and published by Pushkin Collection. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These four stories illustrate the wide range of Zweig’s subject matter dating from quite early in his career as a writer of fiction (The Governess, rooted in a world of strict Edwardian morality), to late (Did He Do It?, almost an English detective story set near Bath, where Zweig lived in exile). In addition The Miracles of Life, set in 16th-century Antwerp during the time of Protestant iconoclasm, and Downfall of a Heart both address the theme of anti-Semitism. Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

Download or read book The Ghostly Bride & Other Stories written by N. Maheswari Devi and published by Partridge Publishing Singapore. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these stories, the narrators are individuals hapless in the face of some kind of trouble. An over-worked doctor, a returning soldier, a worried husband, or an ambushed lawyer; in each case, the supernatural is an unwanted guest that comes a-knocking. Whether it is for better or worse, however, is only revealed at the end, keeping the reader in suspense as the plot unfolds. Even in this modern age of science, there are many episodes that are simply beyond our ken. The Dalvey Estate Midnight Visitor, for instance, recounts the strange events in a ward that lead a medical man to wonder if there may be something else at work to aid him in his noble calling. Similarly, the husband in The Eerie Guardian prides himself on his no-nonsense attitude, easily dismissing his colleagues’ warnings as flights of fancy. Yet, it is only when he becomes trapped in a living nightmare that he begins to seek the truth behind his misfortunes. At the same time, these are more than dime-store pulp horror. Though the stories tell of grisly figures and tragic pasts, at their very heart, they are about fundamentally human emotions. The lingering memory of safety that a parental figure evokes in The Robin Road Peanut Seller. The violent anger at familial betrayal and stolen love in The Ghostly Bride. Look beyond the tattered rags and chilling voices that these spectres wear like armour, and you may find something that is not so different from you and I after all.

Download or read book Balzac written by Stefan Zweig and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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