Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. We select a country and pick three books over the course of three months: one contemporary, one non-fiction, and one classic. Our current country is Austria. For our first meeting we discuss the non-fiction selection The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.

Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. This new translation by award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig’s writing in arguably his most revealing work.

We hope to see you in November to help us create a community you’ll find inviting, fun, engaging and a place to sustain meaningful friendships.

*New Date*: Thursday, November 20, 2025

Time: 6:00PM Central

Location: Berghoff Restaurant, 17 West Adams Street, Chicago, IL 60603

Reviews

“The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed.”—David Hare, award–winning playwright and director of film and theater

“The World of Yesterday is ostensibly an autobiography, but it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig’s glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna’s golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.”—Ronald Harwood, award-winning author, playwright, and screenwriter

“The very success with which this book evokes both the beauty of the past and the fatality of its passing is what gives it tragic effectiveness. It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture. The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative.”—New Republic

Photo Credit: University of Nebraska Press, Promotional Material, Public Domain