Read By: Sheila Heti

The 92nd Street Y, New York · Jul 11, 2021 · 25m

Sheila Heti on her selection: I chose a chapter from Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which he wrote between 1934 and 1941. It is one of the most fascinating and vivid descriptions I have ever read—not only of what Victorian manners and morals were like, but what it feels like to have lived through history, in particular the great political and social upheavals that occurred between his birth in Vienna in 1881 and his death in 1942. He gave his publisher the typewritten manuscript of this memoir the day before he and his wife died, by suicide. Zwieg grew up in a prosperous Jewish…