The Royal Game
A Chess Story
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Narrated by:
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Dan Mellins-Cohen
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By:
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Stefan Zweig
About this listen
The fame of the The Royal Game is evident in the number of translations. The last work of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig can be read today in over 60 languages. The first translation into English appeared in New York in 1944. In Germany, the book has become a constant bestseller. The first-person narrator learns of the presence of the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic on a boat trip from New York to Buenos Aires. Together with his acquaintance Mc Connor and other chess players, the first-person narrator manages to challenge the world champion to a game of chess.
As expected, Mc Connor and the others clearly lose the first game. In the second game, the only way they can get is with the help of a strange man who later turns himself into Dr. B imagines preventing an embarrassing defeat at the last moment and getting a draw. Fascinated by the talent of Dr. B's, the first-person narrator asks him to take on Czentovic. Dr. B. agrees. During the conversation, Dr. B. under what tragic circumstances he started playing chess.
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The Gambler paints a stark picture of the attractions—and addictions—of gambling. Using skillful characterization, Dostoevsky faithfully depicts life among the gambling set in old Germany. This probing psychological novel explores the tangled love affairs and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler, and Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves.
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Gravity of odds and the frailty of human hope
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Darkness at Noon
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- Narrated by: Frank Muller
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A fictional portrayal of an aging revolutionary, this novel is a powerful commentary on the nightmare politics of the troubled 20th century. Born in Hungary in 1905, a defector from the Communist Party in 1938, and then arrested in both Spain and France for his political views, Arthur Koestler writes from a wealth of personal experience.
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Literature as the ‘living memory’ of nations
- By ESK on 01-23-13
By: Arthur Koestler
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Immortality
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- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
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- Unabridged
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Story
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
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Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar
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Maurice Leblanc, a writer of detective fiction during the same period as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, created Arsene Lupin, a sort of French Robin Hood. An inventive genius, a master of disguise, and an accomplished actor, Lupin operates in the choice chateaux and salons. He scorns sham and with great disdain leaves his card in a baron's residence. The card reads, "Arsene Lupin, gentleman-burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine."
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An Old Favorite Made Better
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Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
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Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
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Glad to have existed to enjoy reading this book!
- By mohammed on 08-11-21
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Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: For her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the "inner life".
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"After all, what is love?"
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Beware of Pity
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
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One of my favorite authors
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Dombey and Son
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In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.
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Perfect pair
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The Aspern Papers
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One of the wittiest and most scathing of Henry James' novellas, The Aspern Papers chronicles the attempt to extract the valuable letters of the famous and recently deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern from the hands of his past lover and formidable adversary in the battle Juliana Bordereau. The plot was reputedly suggested to James by a story he heard of an illicit attempt to get hold of several of Lord Byron's letters.
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Cat and mouse
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Swann's Way
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Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.
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Not a book one reads but inhabits & floats through
- By Darwin8u on 02-24-13
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Bulldog Drummond
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Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; excitement essential. When Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC placed that advertisement, he was looking for adventure. What he finds is an international plot headed by the greatest criminal mastermind in the world.
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Fantastic Narration
- By nooch85 on 07-21-18
By: Sapper
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What listeners say about The Royal Game
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cat S.
- 02-17-21
Brief but wonderful
My brother recommended this book after I expressed my excitement for Queen's Gambit. While this has nothing to do with it, it is truly a remarkable little book. As I am furthermore interested in psychology, this book makes for a great little psychological case-study (even if it isn't a true story). But it is so well written and describes the mental health of being confined, which I think during the current pandemic lockdown can be refreshing to read and remind ourselves that it can get a lot worse than what it is now!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Sandra Lorentzen
- 04-21-22
What a storyteller
Zweig puts the reader in the room. Masterful and gripping, whether you care about chess or not.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Brian Jason
- 10-24-21
The Audio is messed up
This is a great story and a fine reader. But the editor or producer is terrible. Maybe 40-50 words are cut off completely.
One issue with the reader: he pronounces “book” without a “k”
::shudder::
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1 person found this helpful
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- Patrick Zircher
- 06-10-24
Excellent
An arrogant savant meets his match in a man who was tortured by the Nazis.
This was superb. A classic among short stories and novellas like The Most Dangerous Game, Occurrence at Owl Creek, the Lottery, and so on.
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Overall
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- John K. Barbour
- 11-16-23
Good overall but not great.
Reasonably well paced and sufficiently captivating if a bit dry. The story is quite interesting for both the Chess enthusiast and the History buff given its time frame and narrative devices. As mentioned, the story telling can run to the dry side at times but not too badly and it is quite short anyway. The recording occasionally cuts off words, though only one here and there.
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