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The Post Office Girl
by Stefan Zweig
“Just finished reading this beautiful, fast-moving, tragic novel. Written in the 1930s...it will haunt me for a long while” Neil Tennant, The Pet Shop Boys
Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s posthumous classic, available here in English for the first time. |
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Christine toils in a provincial post office in Austria just after World War One, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from her rich American aunt inviting Christine to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Immediately she is swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose and Christine is forced to return to the Post office where nothing will ever be the same.
In this haunting yet compassionate reworking of the Cinderella story, Zweig shows us the human cost of the boom and bust of capitalism. The Post Office Girl was completed during the 1930s as Zweig was driven by the Nazis into exile, and was found among his papers after his suicide in 1942. It is available here for the first time in English.
‘Zweig is one of the masters of the short story and novella, and by ‘one of the masters’ I mean that he’s up there with Maupassant, Checkhov, James, Poe or indeed anyone you care to name.’ Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian.
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Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. The most widely translated writer of the 1920s and 1930s, he was closely identified with the humanitarian and tolerant values of pre-war Vienna. With the rise of Nazism he was forced into exile, first in London, then New York and finally Brazil, where he committed suicide in a pact with his wife. The manuscript for The Post Office Girl, his second novel, was found among his papers. This is the first time it has been translated into English. Zweig’s other celebrated works are the novel Beware of Pity and the novella, Chess Story.
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Published for the first time in the UK, this is a real ‘hidden treasure’ of European Literature. |
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Deeply topical, illuminating the human costs of boom and bust capitalism. |
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Widely considered to be his best prose, direct, immediate and compassionate. But did Zweig want it published? |
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Sort Of Books have a remarkable record with European fiction, having sold more than 80,000 copies of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. |
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Major coverage promised on BBC Radio and National Press |
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Word of mouth begins with The Pet Shop Boys... |
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE POST OFFICE GIRL |
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 We are lucky to have this book. Nowhere else does Zweig confront the legacy of the Great War with as deep a social reach or as detailed a human sympathy as he does in The Post-Office Girl. This, he is telling us, is what the war has done to people. This is what history has made of their bodies. This is the fate of a whole generation. William Deresiewicz, The Nation
A Cinderella story in a minor key, set in Austria between the two world wars. The Post Office Girl is captivating. Zweig lavishes his most sensuous prose not just on the elegant trappings of the wealthy but also on the squalor and shame of poverty. Tess Lewis, The Wall Street Journal
Zweig was one of those writers who caught, in moving and often brilliant form, the central concerns of his period – most notably, of course, the burgeoning interest in psychoanalytic truth. Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times |
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Pub date: February 5th 2009
Price: £7.99
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Extent: 272pp
Size: 192 x 128 mm |
ISBN: 978-0-9542217-2-0 Format: B – paperback original |
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