The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Impatience of the Heart, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

Truly gripping, these mini-masterpieces each contain the substance of a condensed full-length novel. Fantastic Night is the story of one transformative evening in the life of a rich and bored young man. He spends a day at the races and an evening in the seedy but thrilling company of the dregs of society. His experiences jolt him out of his languor and give him a newfound relish for life, which is then cut short by the Great War. Two of Zweig's most powerful works, The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, explore lives led in the single-minded pursuit of art and literature against a backdrop of poverty and corruption. Letter from an Unknown Woman is a poignant and heartbreaking tale of the strength and madness of unrequited love, while in The Fowler Snared, it is the man whose passion remains unrequited. Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman is the story of a middle-aged English widow who travels to escape loneliness and boredom. One evening while enjoying the elegant atmosphere of the Monte Carlo Casino, she becomes mesmerized by the obsessive gambling of a young Polish aristocrat. This fateful encounter leads to passion, despair, and death, changing their lives forever.

Casanova, the Venetian who lived most of his life in exile from his beloved city and created his own myth — which in turn is a reflection of the nature of the city itself — is the subject of this masterly biographical essay by Stefan Zweig. As Zweig describes in this volume: Imaginative writers rarely have a biography, and men who have biographies are only in exceptional circumstances able to write them... Casanova is a splendid, almost unique exception.

En 1518, un Portugais exilé du nom de Magellan convainc le roi d’Espagne, Charles Quint, d’un projet fou: «Il existe un passage conduisant de l’océan Atlantique à l’océan Indien. Donnez-moi une flotte et je vous le montrerai et je ferai le tour de la terre en allant de l’est à l’ouest». Partie en 1519, l’expédition reviendra trois ans plus tard, disloquée, victorieuse. Malgré les fausses cartes et les mutineries, le froid, la faim et les maladies, Magellan a forcé le détroit qui porte aujourd’hui son nom et vaincu le Pacifique, inconnu à l’époque. Un destin héroïque magistralement conté et réfléchi par Zweig.