Amok - and Other Stories: Modern Translation of Five haunting tales by Stefan Zweig: Amok, The Woman and the Landscape, Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Moonbeam Alley

by Stefan Zweig, Frank Stillerman (Translator)

A story of passion, obsession, and madness — told with the piercing psychological insight of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.In Amok, a European doctor stationed in the tropics spirals into delirium after a chance encounter with a mysterious woman. His confession, unfolding aboard a homebound ship, becomes a feverish portrait of guilt, desire, and moral collapse.

This edition also includes four of Stefan Zweig’s most haunting and unforgettable tales — The Woman and the Landscape, Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Moonbeam Alley — exploring love, loneliness, and the dark undercurrents of the human soul.

Zweig’s prose, both intimate and intense, captures the restless emotions of a vanished world — yet his insights into human weakness and longing remain timeless.

For readers of The Royal Game, The Post Office Girl, and Chess Story, this collection reveals the full power of Zweig’s elegant, devastating, and profoundly human.

223 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 28, 2025

About the author

Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.