Virtual Memories: George Prochnik – Bildung Stories
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
“Zweig was immersed in the problem of the disjunction between our grand desires for the kind of life we dream we should be living and the actual circumscribed canvas on which we must operate.”
At his peak, Viennese author Stefan Zweig was one of the most widely read authors in the world. How did he and his wife end up in a double-suicide in a bungalow in Petropolis, Brazil? George Prochnik joins us to talk about his new biography, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World
“I think he felt that the more we have to produce official documents to indicate who we are, the more we are reduced to that strip of paper.”
We also talk about our respective introductions to Zweig’s work, the ways that his final novella may be an allegory for Vienna, the danger of looking for clues to Zweig’s suicide in his writing, and how he may have been the inspiration for Woody Allen’s Zelig. Give it a listen! Go pick up a copy of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
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 also the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
Credits: This episode’s music is Brazil by The Coasters. The conversation was recorded at Mr. Prochnik’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
and 
), the author who started him on his path, his balance between writing fiction and essays, how readers read and misread his work, his methods for fusing the personal and the critical, why students should read some of his essays before taking his classes, whether he considered going Hollywood, why and how he assembled 
anthology, and who his favorite New York Met is. (I was surprised by his answer to that last one.)
, 
, 
, 
, and 
,, as well as several novels and novellas, and three poetry collections, and has edited several anthologies, including 
. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. His two most recent books are the personal essay collection 
. The conversation with Ed was recorded at the 
, feeding into a 
into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band.
to its table of contents, saw, Proust at 100, took the book upstairs, cracked open the spine on page 147, and started reading.