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.
“[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”
"Richly rewarding...a major work of historical and cultural
criticism of Europe’s darkest times...Zweig’s haunted talent has
never been better explored than in this exemplary study." —The
Times
“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 émigré 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 own life in a Brazilian city in 1942, his second wife,
Lotte, by his side…Zweig resists intimacy, but Prochnik’s
perceptiveness and gentle humor slip us inside the meticulously
cultivated persona.” —Vogue.com
"It’s hard to imagine a better book about Zweig, or one more worthy
of so complex and multi-faceted a personage. " —LA Review of
Books
"Prochnik’s brilliantly accomplished and genre-bending book allows
access to Zweig in a way that until now seemed
impossible." —New Statesman
"[The Impossible Exile]has the essayistic virtues of brevity,
personality and a relaxed gait...By breaking away from the
cradle-to-grave narrative groove of traditional biography, Prochnik
gives his thought, and his prose, free rein." —The
Telegraph
"The Impossible Exile captures the intractable, persistent
violence wrought upon those who escaped the physical trap of
Nazism, but were nonetheless held captive by fear, and displacement
from self and home." —Bookslut
“Prochnik evocatively portrays the [New York] city Zweig knew [and]
shows us what it meant for Zweig to be there—how hard it was to be
one of the ‘lucky’ ones....[Prochnik] is particularly
empathetic in writing about this dilemma.” —Bookforum
"Well researched, empathic, energetic, The Impossible
Exile is a pleasure to read." —Literary Review
"A winning mix of travelogue and family memoir." —Jewish
Review of Books
"Enlightening and enjoyable." —American Jewish World
“One of the finest literary biographies of the year.”
—Flavorwire
"Sensitive and enthralling...A joy to read...takes you into the
world from which [Zweig's] writing sprang." —The Sunday
Times
“Accessible, compelling, and thorough without being pedantic, this
literary and cultural biography offers keen insight into Zweig’s
life, particularly his final years.” —Library Journal
“Stefan Zweig stands in for Europe’s uprooted intellectuals in this
elegiac portrait by Prochnik….[An] intelligent, reflective and
deeply sad portrait of a man tragically cut adrift by history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“George Prochnik's portrait could hardly be bettered… As he follows
in Zweig's footsteps, Prochnik sheds light on the darkness that
consumed him in his final years. And Lotte, too, emerges as a much
more fully rounded figure. News of their suicide came as a terrible
shock to Zweig's admirers and friends. The Impossible Exile makes
that final act seem much more comprehensible.” —The Independent
“[The Impossible Exile] both traces Zweig’s meteoric rise and fall,
and reveals a changing international climate where European and
American ideas were frequently at odds.” —New Criterion
"Prochnik interprets Zweig with a fluidity few have achieved.
Through a sympathetic melding of the writer's irreconcilable
dichotomies—his philandering and selfishness, alongside his
extravagant generosity even to those who abused him—Prochnik has
created a baffling, loveable, wounded man who charmed the world,
briefly, but could not protect himself even with the shields of
money and prestige." —The Sydney Morning Herald
“Prochnik is so empathically attuned and committed to the full
sweep of Zweig’s by turns glimmering and sorrowful story that
nothing goes unexamined or unfelt in this brilliant and haunting
biography.” —Booklist
"An indelible meditation on exile and its impact on future
generations." —Shelf Awareness
“Subtle-minded and unsentimental, Prochnik makes some sense out of
the enigmatic Zweig...The biography is nestled in excellent
mini-essays on Zweig’s world: journalism, the coffee-house culture,
Viennese snobbery, Jewish snobbery. In turn, that story is
embraced by Prochnik’s own: growing up in America in a family that
had escaped Austria after the Anschluss. The book is in the
bloodline of W.G. Sebald.” —Joan Acocella of The New
Yorker
"[A] very sensitive and accurate account of Zweig’s
uprooting." —Tablet
"A superb new biography." —Haaretz
"[A] majestic meditation on the trauma of Jewish exile, the nature
of fame and the challenges of irrevocable loss." —The London
Magazine
“This books is critical to understanding Zweig.” —CHOICE
“It is not just Zweig in exile whose plight he analyses but the
condition of flight from Hitler’s Europe altogether.” —The
Jewish Chronicle Online
“In his sensitive, emotionally astute and strikingly stylish
account of Stefan Zweig’s exile, George Prochnik manages to convey,
better than virtually any other book I’ve read on the subject, the
awful intellectual and emotional costs of wartime displacement.… A
remarkable work of biographical empathy and imagination.” —Daniel
Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
Million
“Part literary biography, part cultural history, part meditation on
war, art and death, The Impossible Exile gives us the
pulse and fever of Zweig’s desperate and fascinating days.” —David
Laskin, author of The Family: Three Journeys into the
Heart of the 20th Century
“A deeply moving study of one writer’s struggle to adapt to a life
outside the European culture whose values he helped create….A
remarkably rich, multi-dimensional portrait of loss, longing, and
despair.” —Sherill Tippins, critically acclaimed author
of February House and Inside the Dream Palace
“A thrilling blend of literature, cultural history, and
biography, The Impossible Exile casts
a compassionate and slyly contemporary light on what it means
to be torn from one’s life and home. Prochnik is especially
insightful on the psychological cost of exile, the loss of self, of
fame, of relevance, that beset Zweig and his brilliant coterie of
displaced Viennese and German artists, composers, and writers.”
—Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down
Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
“The Impossible Exile is not only a riveting study of one of
the major literary émigrés of the Nazi era, but also a profound
meditation on the nature of fame, the intersection of politics and
art, and the condition of exile itself. … Prochnik brings a
sympathetic but unsparing eye to his subject and in the process
makes the best case I’ve read for the continued importance of this
cultured, humane, yet fascinatingly complicated
figure.” —James Lasdun, author of Give Me Everything You
Have
“This is a beautifully written, deeply felt and ultimately tragic
love story about a deracinated Jewish writer wildly in love with
European culture, who discovers, too late, that European culture
does not love him back. What makes The Impossible
Exile doubly tragic is the way that Zweig mistook his best
self for Europe, just as Europe was mistaking its worst self for
Zweig. The double suicide that resulted is, in Prochnik’s expert
hands, as fascinating as it is unsettling.” —Jonathan Rosen,
author of The Life of the Skies
“The Impossible Exile, a brilliant biographical meditation,
operates with the hypnotic force of a mystery novel, suspensefully
reconstructing an already committed crime. George Prochnik’s style
is at once speedy and ruminative: he combines the risk-loving élan
of a beatnik genius, and the majestic hauntedness of Walter
Benjamin. I am wonderstruck by the erudition and tender feeling
that underlie Prochnik’s masterful account of perpetual, tragic
wandering.” —Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and critic
“George Prochnik has taken the conventions of literary
biography—usually, in fact, the last word in conventionality—and
turned them inside out to create a fast-paced, tension-filled,
almost novel-like exploration of a writer’s personality.” —Lawrence
Osborne, author of The Forgiven
“When the Nazis invaded Austria, Zweig was exiled from his native
country. In the course of the last century, he has been exiled from
his rightful place in world literature. In this enthralling and
meticulous biography, George Prochnik brings the exile
home.” —Judith Thurman, author of Isak Dinesen: The
Life of a Storyteller, winner of the National Book Award for
Non-Fiction
“An immensely dramatic book….Prochnik is always shrewd, always
lyrical, but he outdoes himself in the book’s last pages. There is
a final photo that could break your heart, but it is accompanied by
even more stirring prose, evidence that words can still convey more
than images, and that the childless Zweig has at last found a son.”
—Anthony Heilbut, author of Exiled in Paradise, Thomas
Mann: Eros and Literature, and The Fan Who Knew Too
Much
“Deeply researched and beautifully written…a work that is as
sensitive and exquisite as Zweig’s novellas.” —Ruth Franklin,
contributing editor at The New Republic
“Pitch perfect… [Prochnik’s] research is far-ranging, his
occasional meditations on his own family’s history, to the point.
Though it is a dirge he composes, he writes with the élan that
distinguished Zweig’s own work. Absorbing.” —Flora Fraser,
author of Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire
"An excellent intellectual and personal account which also serves
as a convincing portrait of modern Europe’s darkest days.” —Patrice
Higonnet, Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University
and author of the forthcoming The Four Centuries’ History of a
French Protestant Village in Southern France
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