Pushkin Press Deluxe Classic – serie

'Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game' Economist

'Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella - Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov' Paul Bailey, TLS

Stark, intense, overpowering, A Chess Story is a grandmaster's examination of madness and the power of a mind willing to sacrifice everything to win.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Alexander Starritt.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

Alexander Starritt is the author of the novels We Germans and The Beast. His translations of The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man by Franz Kafka and Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler are also published by Pushkin Press.

'Conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights' Sara Wheeler

'[An] astonishing, haunting memoir' Isabella Tree

The rediscovered classic memoir - the mesmerizingly beautiful account of one woman's year spent living in a remote hut in the Arctic

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable home for a year with her husband on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. On arrival she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape and the lack of supplies... But after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty.

This luminous classic memoir tells of her inspiring journey to freedom and fulfilment in the adventure of a lifetime.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe

Translated by Jane Degras

With a foreword by Sara Wheeler

Born in 1897, CHRISTIANE RITTER was an Austrian artist and author. She wrote A Woman in the Polar Night on her return to Austria from Spitsbergen in 1934. It has since become a classic of travel writing, never going out of print in German and being translated into seven other languages. 'A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,' she would say in her later years. 'Then you will come to realise what's important in life and what isn't.' Ritter died in Vienna in 2000 at the age of 103.

The captivating original English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would go on to influence countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.

Now published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Vita Sackville-West and Edward Sackville-West

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is considered one of the greatest German-language writers to have ever lived. He is best known for his Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Stunning edition of the standalone novella from Proust's great masterpiece, in a new translation

When Charles Swann first lays eyes on Odette de Crécy, he is indifferent to her beauty. Their paths continue to cross in the drawing rooms and theatres of Parisian high society, and the seeds of desire in Swann begin to flourish. What follows is a journey through self-delusion, jealousy and delirious fantasy, which will take Swann far from the sedate comfort of his society life.

A standalone novella from Proust's monumental masterpiece, Swann in Love is a sublimely witty and poignant story of the illusions of love and desire. Full of the rich social satire and penetrating insight that distinguish Proust's style, it is the perfect introduction to one of the world's great novelists.

'Read Montaigne in order to live' - Gustave Flaubert

'I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: "How did he know all that about me?"' - The Times

A selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li

'I myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement.

This new selection of Montaigne's most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.