Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March is an elegiac chronicle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's decline, traced through three generations of the Trotta family. From the grandfather's accidental heroism at Solferino to the grandson's moral and military drift on the empire's eastern margins, Roth transforms private fate into imperial allegory. His prose combines lucid realism, ceremonial rhythm, and devastating irony, placing the novel within the great interwar literature of historical disillusion...

Hiob (Job) is Joseph Roth's austere modern parable of Mendel Singer, a poor Jewish teacher from a Galician shtetl whose faith is tested by illness, exile, family rupture, and bereavement. Written in a lucid, almost biblical prose, the novel transposes the Book of Job into the age of mass migration and modern disillusion. Roth's restrained style—at once folkloric, ironic, and deeply compassionate—places the work within interwar European literature's searching meditations on suffering, provi...

Joseph Roth's Spider's Web is a prescient political novel of Weimar Germany, tracing the rise of Theodor Lohse, a humiliated ex-officer who converts resentment into power through espionage, nationalist intrigue, and antisemitic conspiracy. Written in a taut, journalistic style sharpened by irony and psychological acuity, the book stands in the literary context of postwar European disillusionment, anticipating the mechanisms by which fascism would seduce the embittered and ambitious. Roth, ...

This modern fable of the Russian Revolution from the author of The Radetzy March follows the tragic life of a peasant who seeks meaning in violence.A Russian peasant, Nicholas Tarabas learns in his youth from a gypsy that he is destined to be both a murderer and saint. After fleeing to America under suspicion of a crime, he soon returns to fight for his homeland in World War I. Finding purpose in the army, he becomes a merciless officer, terrorizing townsp...

This collection showcases the renowned author's "genius for metaphor, his compassionate irony, and his historical and psychological insight" ( The Wall Street Journal).Austrian author Joseph Roth was one of Europe's most powerful and perceptive literary voices during the turbulent period between WWI and WWII. This collection presents three of his most enduring works of fiction. "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" tells the story of a dissolute vagrant who is u...

A critically acclaimed early work from the author of The Radetzky March— one of the most significant literary German novels ever written After the end of World War I, Gabriel Dan is released from a POW camp in Russia and begins making his way home to Austria. He comes to an industrial town in Poland, and checks in the ramshackle Hotel Savoy while awaiting financial aid from his family. Here he meets a kaleidoscope of characters, a microcosm of society in which rich and poor, itinerants, di...

Long out of print in English, this dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic has less to do with religion than with what Roth sees as the disintegrating moral fabric of the modern world**Written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, this work was composed in cafés across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames. Such events no doubt influence the apocalytic tones of The Antichrist's p...

Now available for the first time in English, this important addition to the Roth canon is rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observationA novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death, this book chronicles the life and times of Alexander Perlefter, the well-to-do Austrian urbanite with whom his relative, a small-town narrator, Naphthali Kroj, has come to live after becoming orphaned. The...

From the celebrated author of The Radetzky March comes the tragic story of a WWI officer caught in the tumult of a world on the verge of modernity.As an Austro-Hungarian officer on the Eastern Front of World War I, Franz Tunda was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Dreaming of a return to his life in Vienna, he escapes from prison—only to get caught up in the Russian Revolution, fall in love, and fight for the Bolshevik cause.Upon finall...

A POW meets other survivors of World War I in a Polish hotel in this acclaimed classic novel by the author of The Radetzky March.Still bearing the scars from gulag experiences, a freed POW traverses Russia to arrive at the Polish town of Lodz. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself at the time, the hotel is the stage upon which charac...

The renowned author of The Radetzky March examines the mind of a Russian Revolutionary and the limitations of ideology in this classic n ovel.Based on his own observations during an extended stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926, The Silent Prophet is Joseph Roth's vivid attempt to explain the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by exposing the personal motivations of its leaders. Written at the height of speculation about the fate of Marxist Revolu...

An Orthodox Jew's faith is tested when he leaves Tsarist Russia for NYC in this retelling of the Book of Job—"inspired in its poetry and its deep insight" (The New York Times).Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious Eastern-European Jew who teaches the Torah to children, and whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is r...