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The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World

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  His Exile Was Intolerable Anka Muhlstein Why was Stefan Zweig unable to rebuild his life? May 8, 2014 issue Reviewed: The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik Other Press, 390 pp., $27.95 The Grand Budapest Hotel a film directed by Wes Anderson On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple’s deaths were reported on the front page of  The New York Times . Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, “he belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of t...
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SHOTS FIRED!

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  Dispatch Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Gunshots Rang Out I thought a caterer might have dropped a stack of plates, but then I heard shouts of “Shots fired!” By  April 26, 2026 Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Save this story In the spring of 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton on his way out of a luncheon. Cabdrivers sometimes call it the Hinckley Hilton—a weird local homage to the shooter, John Hinckley, Jr. On Saturday evening, I walked by the hotel, in the rain, as antiwar protesters yelled through bullhorns at journalists streaming inside for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It was the War Crimes Correspondents’ dinner, they shouted. I was on my way to the White House to join the press pool, the small contingent of media that travels with the President wherever he goes. We loaded into vans in the motorcade and waited for Donald and Melania Trump to enter the Beast, the President’s bullet...
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A Wunderkind’s Best-Selling Nostalgia

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  Page-Turner A Wunderkind’s Best-Selling Nostalgia Nelio Biedermann’s “Lázár” is, for the most part, the well-rehearsed story of twentieth-century Europe. Why is it making such waves? By  April 23, 2026 Nelio Biedermann, a Swiss novelist, at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. Photograph by Clara Watt / NYT / Redux Save this story “Make it new,” proclaimed the poet Ezra Pound early in the twentieth century. It was his advice to fellow-modernists, and it became the de-facto slogan of a movement that sought to unsettle convention and reinvigorate language. The motto of our contemporary cultural apparatus might as well be “make it old.” Even before A.I. threatened us quite so acutely with the prospect of eternal recombination, a spate of period dramas, remakes, sequels, and adaptations had already paved the way for a future consisting of regurgitated scraps of the past. Take the past few years alone: 2024 brought “Nosferatu,” a remake of Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of...
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