Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters - Hardcover

Joseph Roth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060640 ISBN 13: 9780393060645

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Synopsis

The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth―with Kafka, Mann, and Musil―in the twentieth-century literary canon.

Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life―his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris.

Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”

About this title

About the Authors

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published several books and articles before his untimely death at the age of 44. Roth’s writing has been admired by J. M. Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elie Wiesel, and Nadine Gordimer, among many others.

The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024.

Reviews

*Starred Review* “The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty.” Roth (1894–1939), a budding writer, sent these thoughts to his cousin Paula in 1917—words that took on enormous weight with crushing repercussions as he became an impassioned, incisively observant, renowned, and beleaguered journalist and novelist, crisscrossing Europe with laser eyes, tracking the early warning signs of monstrous catastrophes to come. Award-winning translator Hofmann has been instrumental in stoking new appreciation for Roth’s incandescent work (including his masterpiece, The Radetzky March), and now brings his profound fluency in Roth’s vision and writing to this accidental autobiography-in-letters, providing invaluable background and analysis in his refulgent commentary. In 457 arresting letters, Roth, a man of torrential talent, energy, and soul, blazes forth in all his fiery insight, prescience, wit, rage, and despair, chronicling a world succumbing to the apocalyptic spell of the Third Reich. Hardworking and hard-drinking, forever broke, embattled, and ill, Roth badgers editors and publishers, coos to admirers, and bellows, begs, whines, and confides to the famous and wealthy writer Stefan Zweig, Roth’s most generous and loyal ally and complete opposite. No letter collection is more intense nor more revealing of the anguished and heroic artistic struggle to confront horror with truth and beauty. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393060640
• ISBN 13: 9780393060645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512