Beware of Pity - Couverture souple

Zweig, Stefan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0140068074 ISBN 13 : 9780140068078

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 1985

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Stefan's Zweig' Beware of Pity is an almost unbearably tense and powerful tale of unrequited love and the danger of pity. The famous novel is published by Pushkin Press in a cloth bound hardback, beautifully designed by Nathan Burton and translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell.

In 1913 a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible danger of pity. He had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance his compensatory afternoon calls relieve his guilt but give her a dangerous glimmer of hope.
Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, realised against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

'Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel'
— Anthony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph

The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 ... and part of the ongoing, valiant reprinting by Pushkin Press of Zweig's collected oeuvre; an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best'
— Ali Smith, TLS Book of the Year 2008

'An unremittingly tense parable about emotional blackmail, this is a book which turns every reader into a fanatic'
— Julie Kavanagh, Intelligent Life (The Economist)

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity is published by Pushkin Press.

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.

In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide.

Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Revue de presse :

"Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original and powerful work...Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could dare to attempt...Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he seemed to be--in his novelettes and biographies--before he wrote it: a brilliant writer." --The New York Times

"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." --The New York Times

"Herr Zweig presents this story with considerable skill, with compelling force...It is a good story." --The New York Times

"What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this. His theme, or moral, which he does not obtrude on us in any clumsy way, is that impulsive pity for others is a dangerous emotion with embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous results." --Sunday Telegraph

"Beware of Pity is an utterly unsparing dissection of the corruptions of false pity...In stripping away the lies with which we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the larger lies of the age: it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that 'low, dishonest decade,' as Auden termed it." --The New York Sun

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0140068074
• ISBN 13: 9780140068078
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368