A moving and original examination of Austrian Jewish author Stefan Zweig's fall from world fame in the 1920s and early 1930s to exile and death by suicide in 1942

"[A] superbly lyrical study..."The Impossible Exile" is not really--or not just--a biography of Zweig's final years. It is a case study of dislocation, of people who had not only lost a home but who were no longer able to define the meaning of home...Mr. Prochnik gives a very rich sense of what so many exiles experienced during the war...[his] words could not be more resonant." --Andre Aciman, "The "Wall Street Journal"" "Poignant, insightful."" --The New Yorker" "[A]n intriguing...meditation on Zweig's last years. ...an intellectual feast served as a series of canapes. " --"The New York Times Book Review ""Subtle, prodigiously researched and enduringly human throughout, The Impossible Exile is a portrait of a man and of his endless flight." --"The Economist" ""The Impossible Exile "[is] a gripping, unusually subtle, poignant, and honest study. Prochnik attempts, on the basis of an uncompromising investigation, to clarify the motives that might have driven to suicide an author who still enjoyed a rare popularity." --Anka Muhlstein, "New York Review of Books " "[Wes] Anderson told Fresh Air's Terry Gross that until a few years ago, he had never heard of Zweig -- and he's not alone. Many moviegoers share Anderson's past ignorance of the man who was once one of the world's most famous and most translated authors. George Prochnik is out to change that." --"NPR," ""All Things Considered"" "A terrific book...Prochnik focuses on Zweig's later years, discussing in detail his wanderings in the nineteen-thirties and forties--to Great Britain, the United States, and his last stop, Brazil. Zweig lived in New York for a while, and Prochnik movingly documents the toll that the author's peculiar prominence among the Jewish emigre community took on him, especially at a time when millions of Jews who remained in Europe were dying." --"NewYorker.com" "[A] fascinating study of the author who escaped the Nazis only to take his ow

GEORGE PROCHNIK's essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. He lives in New York City.