The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig – Great Books Reading Group *Sold Out*

featuring Tin Wegel, Teaching Associate Professor of German

“Is it possible to have a realist fairy story? If so, this is it. The characters are so well realised and observed, and there are passages of such imaginative immersion, that we owe its publisher our gratitude for bringing it into English for the first time. What a treat this book is”. –The Spectator (UK)

“An exhilarating ski run of poverty, joy and misery… it is the girl’s ecstatic naivety and Zweig’s sparkling prose that makes the old stories so sweetly fresh and, when the whole dream collapses, so devastatingly sad”. –The Sunday Times (UK)

“In The Post-Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart…The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction’s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.” –The Spectator (UK)

“This is a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives.” –The Financial Times

“The Post Office Girl is a fine novel and an excellent place to start if you are new to this great Austrian novelist. It is a powerful social history, describing in moving detail the social impact of the First World War, and the extreme poverty in which so many people were forced to live. It shows up the challenge to European civilisation of the early Thirties and the failure of humanism, in which Zweig believed until the end of his life. And it is remarkable for the bleak interior worlds it depicts of anxiety, self-doubt, depression and disintegration. Zweig succeeded in taking the most complex concepts of psychoanalysis and bringing them vividly to life.” –The Telegraph

“Stefan Zweig was a late and magnificent bloom from the hothouse of fin de siecle Vienna…The posthumous publication of a Zweig novel affords an opportunity to revisit this gifted writer…The Post-Office Girl is captivating.” –The Wall Street Journal

TUITION: $35, includes a copy of the book

This event is sold out. Call 919.962.1544 to be added to the waitlist.

Please note that the image may not reflect the edition being used for the reading group.