` The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, & it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation
- our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.` During his lifetime, Stefan Zweig`s (1881-1942) works were immensely popular & widely translated. In the decades after his death, he was largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. Recent years, however, have witnessed a resurgence of interest in this singular author, & Pushkin Press has been at the forefront of this movement. The World of Yesterday, Zweig`s memoir, was completed shortly before his suicide. It charts the history of Europe from nineteenth-century splendour, decadence & complacency, through the devastation of the First World War, to the resultant brutality & depravity ofthe Nazi regime. The World of Yesterday is a heartfelt tribute to an age of humanity & enlightenment that Zweig feared was lost for ever. An incomparable record of a lost era, this is also essential reading for those who have already fallen in love with Zweig`s fiction. ` One of the canonical European testaments...[ Zweig`s] life & work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security-a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear` John Gray, New Statesman ` One of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century` David Hare ` Stefan Zweig`s time of oblivion is over for good...it`s good to have him back` Salman Rushdie, The New York Times ` One of the joys of recent years is the translation into English of Stefan Zweig`s stories` Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes ` Zweig deserves to be famous again, & for good` Times Literary Supplement ` Indispensable` The Times Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin & Vienna & was first known as a poet & translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, & enjoyed literary fame. His stories & 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 & his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.