A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889;

A National Book Award Finalist from the bestselling Frederic Morton

"Frederic Morton's A NERVOUS SPLENDOR is my favorite book about Vienna." —John Irving

On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed height of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf shot and killed his teenage mistress and then himself in a suicide pact. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still.

Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling THE ROTHSCHILDS, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." Other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince—moved through his Vienna. Among them were a young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle.