{"product_id":"9781590175903","title":"The Post-Office Girl","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eWes Anderson on Stefan Zweig:\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e \"I had never heard of Zweig...when    I just more or less by chance bought a copy of \u003ci\u003eBeware of Pity\u003c\/i\u003e. I loved this    first book.  I also read    the \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eGirl\u003c\/i\u003e.  \u003ci\u003eThe Grand Budapest Hotel\u003c\/i\u003e has elements that were sort of stolen    from both these books. Two   characters in our story are vaguely meant to    represent Zweig himself —   our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson,    and the   theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law.      But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph  Fiennes,    is modelled significantly on Zweig as well.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2009 PEN Translation Prize Finalist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eThe logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office Girl\u003c\/i\u003e, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office Girl\u003c\/i\u003e, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master’s achievement.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47137971273968,"sku":"9781590175903","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781590175903_p0.jpg?v=1763801948","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781590175903","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}