"The ageing civil servant Eduard Saxberger has banished all hope of literary renown. His one collection of youthful verse never led to the glittering career he hoped for, and he has resigned himself to the fact that he'll live out his life as, after all, just an ordinary man. Until, that is, a young admirer seeks him out and declares his deepest admiration for his early poems. He invites Saxberger to join him and his circle of fellow writers, who regularly meet at one of Vienna's grand coffee houses: Saxberger is their model, their literary hero. Embarrassed at first, the old man eventually gives in, flattered and fascinated by the self-styled 'Enthusiasts' (not to be confused, of course, with the 'Talentless', who sit at the other tables in the café). Will Saxberger find the inspiration he needs to write a new masterpiece? Will he be able to help the Enthusiasts to attain the public recognition for which they hunger? Will he, indeed, find late love as well as late fame? Ah, but everything is not as it seems... by Arthur Schnitzler (b. 1862 in Vienna), who qualified as a doctor but was increasingly driven to a career in writing, resulting in several celebrated plays, novellas and novels which explore the great existential subjects of the modern age: relationships, love, sex, ageing and death. Because his work dealt with subjects considered taboo, he frequently attracted the hostility of the authorities, consequently losing his position as Chief Medic in the Reserve Army and being tried for disorderly conduct. Schnitzler was close friends with Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud, who both admired him greatly, and a member of the 'Young Vienna' circle of writers who regularly met at a café nicknamed 'Café Megalomania' - the very same clique and café he satirises so deliciously in Late Fame. Schnitzler died in 1931."-- Publisher's website.

As a group of respectable citizens gather on the summer lawns to play tennis, exchange pleasantries and gossip of indiscretions, we learn that a young pianist has just committed suicide, that Friedrich Hofreiter, the town's leading citizen, has just ended an affair with an associate's wife, and that Friedrich 's wife's rejection of the pianist caused him to take his life. Friedrich (a well-known philanderer) is stunned and appalled -- not by the fact that his wife may have had a dalliance, but that a man shot himself because of her virtue. He leaves for a trip to the mountains in the company of friends and the beautiful young Erna, who admits to having loved him since she was a child. Erna awakens complicated passions in Friedrich, while Friedrich's wife, worn down by her love for her unfaithful husband, takes a lover in his absence.