Description

‘Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game’ Economist

‘Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella – Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov’ Paul Bailey, TLS

Chess 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 games played in his imagination. In agreeing to take on Czentovic, what price will Dr B ultimately pay?

Stark, intense, overpowering, A Chess Story is a grandmaster’s examination of madness and the power of a mind willing to sacrifice everything to win.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Alexander Starritt.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

Alexander Starritt is the author of the novels We Germans and The Beast. His translations of The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man by Franz Kafka and Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler are also published by Pushkin Press.

Publisher Review

‘Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game. Never mind that you may have never moved a pawn to King four; the story will grip you’ – Economist

‘The novella is one of Zweigs most horrifying investigations into monomania and at the same time a parable of the dangers inherent in engaging with Nazism’ – Ruth Franklin