On Stefan Zweig: George Prochnik and James Lasdun
Wednesday 14 May, 2014
7pm, $0
The Center for Fiction
17 East 47 Street
Authors George Prochnik and James Lasdun will be discussing Stefan Zweig, the provocative Austrian writer who was the inspiration for Wes Anderson's recent film The Grand Budapest Hotel. The event will include a discussion, Q&A, and wine reception.
About The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (Other Press)
An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself.
The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.
George Prochnik's essays and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Bookforum and The Boston Globe, among other places. His new book, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, will be published in May. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet Magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology.