Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig's novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novellas Chess Story and Journey Into the Past.
Anthea Bell is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Zweig's Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
George Prochnik is the author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. He has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Cabinet, among other publications.
