About this title: "Chess Story," also known as "The Royal Game," is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological. Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to ...
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Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9781590171691ISBN:1590171691
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. First Edition; Gift Quality. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 84 p. New York Review Books Classics. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9781590171691ISBN:1590171691
Description: New. "Chess Story, " also known as "The Royal Game, " is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig look... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Date Published: 2005-11-09
ISBN-13:9781590171691ISBN:1590171691
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781590171691. read more
"An interesting story of suspense and chess by a writer that it is finally being rediscovered. The final novel by Zweig was published following his suicide and that of his wife in 1942. Like the main character, the author's mental anguish was created by the Nazism that was taking over Europe and the reason behind the author's decision to leave Austria and end his life while in exile ("I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth"). For Zweig and his wife Europe and everything it represented was taken away by the Nazis. Another victim of the horrors of war."
"Incredibly elegant and compact novella, where the atrocities of the Nazi regime are eloquently conveyed via a spontaneous chess tournament.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer on is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individuals image of the world.""
"First of all, I love the New York Review Books series. They always pick excellent titles by excellent authors to bring back into the light of day. Zweig's novella is no exception. The story is simple, and doesn't break new ground in terms of divulging the horrors of the German occupations around the Second World War. It does, however, offer a sensitive portrait of the individual psychological impact of the regime's calculated interrogation techniques. I think that only makes the irony greater that I read it in a couple of hours in the sun on the Fourth of July waiting for the fireworks to start..."
"The last thing Zweig wrote before killing himself in Argentina with his wife. The latent self-consumption of the mind is well in evidence. Mind as room, as chessboard, as square on the chessboard, as potential move from one square to the other, etc. Zweig seemed to have written this story about an imprisoned resister against the Nazis to rewrite his own lack of resistance. The White Ego, as he puts it in the book, plays the Black Ego over and over."
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