Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that 'was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history'. Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about. Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer whose life connected with James Joyce, Richard Strauss, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler - among many others. He was, essentially, a European of the old school, and his last book, "The World of Yesterday", testifies to this. Zweig was born in 1881; he lived to see the continent torn apart by two world wars and committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 when, after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, he came to believe that a Nazi world was inevitable. "The World of Yesterday" was written shortly before his suicide and was intended as a literary capsule to remind future generations of the world that they had lost, and how that loss had come about. The main trajectory of the book is from an old world of seeming 'security' in which notions of peace, dignity and learning reigned, to the new world of war in which Hitler had destroyed all of these things. Zweig provides a vivid portrait of how war and terror can sweep over a people who are seemingly oblivious to what is happening to them. The process, in Zweig's view, vindicates the apparent pessimism of his friend Sigmund Freud - who believes that culture could never overcome the subconscious and malevolent desires of a people. Zweig lost almost everything he had to the Nazis. He was an Austrian jew who fled because he knew what was coming. The book is written entirely from memory. Its language consequently tends to lurch from the high flown and sentimental, to chillingly accurate vignettes of how a people can delude themselves about a catastrophe in their midst. He manages to convey his horror when, on his final visit to Austria, he realised that none of his friends and family could imagine the worst that could happen - and hence did not believe his exhortations to leave while they could: 'They invited each other to full-dress parties (little thinking that they would soon be wearing prisoner's clothes in a concentration camp)'.

"Quel che si racconta in questo libro è già accaduto e lontano, richiamato come un'epifania dalla ricorrenza di una data che appare nelle ultime pagine 13 febbraio 1883 (morte di Wagner) e 13 febbraio 1900 (chiusura del manoscritto) - e che intreccia romanzo e vita. Così la storia d'amore e il progetto d'arte, entrambi mancati, appartengono alla sfera del rimpianto che inevitabilmente rende languidi i fallimenti e seducenti le illusioni." (Filippo Tuena)
Gabriele d'Annunzio, born Gaetano Rapagnetta (1863-1938) was an Italian poet, writer, novelist, dramatist, womanizer and daredevil who went on to have a controversial role in politics as figure-head of the Italian Fascist movement and mentor of Benito Mussolini. His literary works included: "The Child of Pleasure," "The Intruder," "The MAidens of the Rocks," and "The Flame of Life" ("Il Fuoco").

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after "Buddenbrooks" had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, "Death in Venice" tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.'
A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and
Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other.
This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
One of the world's best storytellers, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities) pinpoints for future generations the universal values for literature. Here are his works, methods, intentions, and hopes.

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter’s depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
First published in 1938, this classic gothic novel is such a compelling read that it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as
and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including
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is an uncompromising account of Gregor von Rezzori's aristocratic childhood in Romania in the days before World War II.
He was born in Czernowitz, a one-time provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents, and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.
The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust’s
to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.