Anthea Bell

A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in...

A suave baron takes a fancy to twelve-year-old Edgar's mother, while the three are holidaying in an Austrian mountain resort. His initial advances rejected, the baron befriends Edgar in order to get closer to the woman he desires. The initially unsuspecting child soon senses something is amiss, but has no idea of the burning secret that is driving...

Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother predictable after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover’s former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband. Irene is soon in the grip of...

Compulsion, In the Snow and Wondrak all concern Zweig's strong anti-war feelings following the First World War. The artist Ferdinand, central figure of Compulsion, partly reflects Zweig's own experience. In The Snow tells of the plight of a group of Jews who freeze to death while trying to escape a medieval pogrom. In Wondrak , a woman,...

The less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly. So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C - recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion of a desperate stranger, she discovers a purpose once...

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. The Invisible...

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...

The folk tales collected by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were first published in 1812–15, and in many more editions up to the deaths of the brothers around 1860. While no one knows where the tales first came from; features of many are found in myths from all over the world. They were passed on for centuries in the oral tradition,...

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King may seem almost over-familiar as the inspiration for TcHaikovsky’s equally famous ballet (in fact based on a French retelling of Hoffmann’s original German tale). However, its translation is rarely ever entire. This edition displays the full range of Hoffmann’s...

Kurt Gerber embarks hopefully on his last year at school, leading to the all-important exam, but finds that he is constantly at odds with the sadistic class teacher Professor Kupfer, known to his students as "Lord God Kupfer", who particularly dislikes him. Inspired partly by its author’s own experience of his final school-leaving...