Montaigne

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 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. Between the wars, Zweig 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 left Austria to live in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled 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.Will Stone born 1966, is a poet, essayist and literary translator who divides his time between Suffolk and the European continent. His first poetry collection Glaciation (Salt, 2007), won the International Glen Dimplex Award for Poetry in 2008 (Dublin). His translations from French and German include works by Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gérard de Nerval, Georg Simmel, Maurice Betz, Guy de Pourtalès, Emile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach. His most recent translations were a collection of letters by Rilke from French, Letters around a Garden (Seagull Books, 2024) and Conversations with Rilke, a memoir by the poet's French translator Maurice Betz (Pushkin, 2025).

“Thanks to Stone’s assiduous translation, Zweig’s fascinating meditation on the writer in whom he saw himself mirrored appears now for the first time in English. Zweig weaves biographical elements into his study—Montaigne’s study of Latin at age four, his retirement from his public duties as a French nobleman at age 38—but the book is more properly an introduction to an endlessly inquisitive thinker who never stopped searching for the truth . . . This captivating study portrays a writer whose life and work can be summed up by his constant posing of the question, ‘How should I live?’”—Publishers Weekly“Zweig’s accumulated historical and cultural studies remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in.” —Clive James, critic and journalist“[Pushkin Press’s republication of Stefan Zweig's work] has been entirely successful. Zweigmania seems to break out with the publication of each book, with readers discovering his work by word-of-mouth and by accident.”—Guardian“[Zweig’s] life and work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security-a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear.”—John Gray, New Statesman