7 h 33 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 7 h 33 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when one feeling takes hold of a life and refuses to let go?
In Stefan Zweig’s Amok, a sleepless passenger meets a doctor aboard a ship sailing toward Europe. The doctor needs to confess. Behind his story lies a lonely station, a proud woman’s secret request, and a duty that becomes an obsession.
This collection brings together Amok, The Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Moonlit Alley, and Woman and Landscape. A writer named R. receives a letter from a woman he cannot remember. A wealthy Viennese man feels nothing amid his comforts. Across these lives, desire threatens to overwhelm judgment.
What you’ll discover
- A confession at sea Listen through the night as a lonely doctor tells a stranger what drives him.
- Love without recognition Enter a letter that holds years of secret love for a man who does not remember.
- Comfort without feeling Meet a wealthy Viennese man whose comfortable life leaves him bored and numb.
- Duty under pressure Follow a skilled physician as a private request draws his duty toward obsession.
- Desire beyond reason Explore five lives shaped by feelings that seem less like choices than unstoppable forces.
Who will love it
For readers who love short fiction about inner life, confession and fate, and anyone curious about Vienna before the war.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Zweig writes passion as a force
- A stranger confesses on a ship's deck
- The doctor's duty becomes an obsession
- A letter holds a lifetime of love
- Three tales of awakening and unease
- What the five stories say together
Who’s who
- The doctorA skilled European physician, lonely in a remote colonial station, who tells his story to a stranger on a ship.
- The narratorA passenger on the ship who listens through the night to the doctor's confession.
- The proud ladyA cold, high-standing European woman who comes to the doctor with a request she cannot let become public.
- The unknown womanThe writer of a long letter who has loved one man in secret since she was a girl in Vienna.
- R., the writerA famous Viennese novelist who receives the letter on his birthday and does not remember its author.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
- The same book in bigger, clearer type, from the first page.
- Audiobook
- 7 h 33 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 8 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Amok in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Amok
by Stefan Zweig · 1922
On a dark ship's deck, a doctor confesses to a stranger how obsession seized his life.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Amok is a book of five novellas by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer, first gathered in German in 1922. The stories are Amok, The Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Moonlit Alley, and Woman and Landscape.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Zweig writes passion as a force
Zweig was a master of the novella, a form long enough to hold a whole life and short enough to be read in one evening. In this collection he sets aside the broad social canvas of the large Victorian novel. He looks instead at one person at one moment of crisis. The crisis is nearly always emotional, and it often happens in secret.
His characters are not villains or heroes. They are ordinary people, a doctor, a writer, a rich idler, a lonely woman, who find that a single feeling has taken over their will. Zweig was a close reader of Freud's Vienna, and he shares the idea that hidden drives shape what people do. He does not lecture on this. He shows it through scenes where a person acts against all sense and cannot say why.
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What is Amok by Stefan Zweig about?
Amok is a collection of five novellas about people overtaken by one strong feeling. The title story follows a doctor in the colonies who tells a stranger on a ship what drove him to act without control.
What does the word amok mean in the story?
Amok comes from a Malay word for a state of sudden, blind frenzy in which a person rushes about, unable to stop. Zweig uses it to describe the doctor's loss of self-control in his obsession.
Which stories are in Amok?
The five novellas are Amok, The Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Moonlit Alley, and Woman and Landscape. Letter from an Unknown Woman is the best known and has been adapted for film.
The author
Stefan Zweig
1881–1942 · Austrian novelist and biographer
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer born in Vienna in 1881. He wrote stories, novels, biographies, and essays. The Love of Erika Ewald appeared in 1904, Burning Secret in 1911, and Amok in 1922. He lived in Austria, Britain, and Brazil. He died in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942.
More by Stefan Zweig
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