Joseph Roth's "Report from a Parisian Paradise" serves as a poignant reflection on France during the 1920s and 1930s, capturing the nation's beauty and despair through vivid landscapes and compelling characters. As an exile in Paris, Roth's prose combines haunting imagery with deep philosophical insights, portraying a country on the brink of change. This work stands as both a tribute to a fading European order and a profound commentary on the human condition, showcasing Roth's mastery as one of the era's greatest foreign correspondents.
"Roth's prose is quick, lucid and ironic; his fictions read like realist fables. Granta here presents his stories and novellas in new translations by the poet Michael Hofman."
Glowingly reviewed, the revival of Roth's work--about the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness--introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author.
) Roth, celebrated as a great novelist, was also a journalist, and this is the first English language publication of his non-fiction: a moving and unsentimental portrait of the vanished world of the East European Jewish community.
New translations of the six greatest short stories by Joseph Roth, collected in a beautiful edition Joseph Roth's sensibility--both clear-eyed and nostalgic, harshly realistic and tenderly humane--produced some of the most distinctive fiction of the twentieth century. This collection of his most essential stories, in exquisite new translations by Ruth Martin, showcases the astonishing range and power of his short stories and novellas. In prose of aching beauty and precision, Roth shows us isolated souls pursuing lost ideals and impossible desires. Forced to remove a bust of the fallen Austrian emperor from his house, an eccentric old count holds a funeral for it and intends to be buried in the same plot himself; a humble coral merchant, dissatisfied with his life and longing for the sea, chooses to adulterate his wares with false coral, with catastrophic results; young Fini, just entering the haze of early sexuality, falls into an unsatisfying relationship with an older musician. With the greatest craft and sensitivity, Roth unfolds the many fragilities of the human heart.
At the end of the Great War, Andreas Pum has lost a leg but at least he has a medal and a barrel-organ which he plays on the streets of Vienna. At first the simple-minded veteran is satisfied with his lot, and he even finds an ample widow to marry. But then a public quarrel with a respectable citizen on a tram turns Andreas's life onto a rapid downward trajectory. As he loses first his beggar's permit, then his new wife, and even his freedom, he is finally provoked into rejecting his blind faith in the benevolence of both government and God.
A companion piece to Roth's masterpiece, The Radetzky March: an aching novel reckoning with the legacy of war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of the Nazi party.
Gabriel Dan is a former soldier in the Austrian Army who returns from a Siberian prison camp some time after the First World War. He arrives in an unnamed town and lodges at the Hotel Savoy. The owner is absent, the guests are deranged and murder and chaos ensue.
