The Hotel Years - Hardcover

Joseph Roth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783781270 ISBN 13: 9781783781270

Publisher: Granta Books, 2015

Synopsis

Edited, translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann, this is a selection of Joseph Roths journalism from Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine during the 1920s and 1930s, when Roths peripatetic life led him from hotel to hotel across Europe.

About this title

About the Author

JOSEPH ROTH (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls, The Emperor's Tomb and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

Review

“This wonderful selection of journalism from the Weimar years, a period Roth spent in Paris, Germany and on the road, displays genius from every angle, as a rebel, a loyalist and a man of compassion.”
- Jan Morris, Daily Telegraph

“Roth's journalism creates a vivid sense of a continent on the brink of change.”
- Independent on Sunday

“Nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance.”
- Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review

“Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux guerres'.”
- TLS

“Joseph Roth: his view arises from the deepest human pity everywhere. I cannot imagine how he does this except instinctively. He is incomparable.”
- Anne Carson

“I love going back to Joseph Roth. He's one of the best journalists who ever lived and certainly an amazing writer and novelist. His book called The Hotel Years are articles he wrote about staying in hotels, mostly in eastern Europe as it then was in the last days of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. I love his style of observation and his descriptions of characters and so on. I always feel enriched when I put down a book by Joseph Roth.”
- John le Carré

“Roth captures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization.”
- Cynthia Ozick

“A singular achievement of both journalism and literature.”
- Thane Rosenbaum, The Washington Post Book World

“His was a voice of uncowed conscience and irrepressible humanism, his body of work a damning j’accuse against the folly of the age. The dispatches in The Hotel Years constitute a compelling vindication of his claims for the feuilleton’s literary possibilities.”
- Houman Barekat, Los Angeles Review of Books

“So consistently incisive that we devour the lot, compulsively, from cover to cover.”
- Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent

“Roth was as equally magisterial and entertaining in his journalism as he was in his novels, and Michael Hofmann’s new selection of Roth’s nonfiction, his fourteenth translation of Roth’s overall, is thoroughly addictive.”
- André Naffis-Sahely, Paris Review

“Dazzling, elegiac, mordant and harrowingly oracular by turn.”
- George Prochnik, New York Times Book Review

“The Hotel Years is a master class in journalism, and a reminder that when a writer can play multiple small notes, he creates a full composition that carries the depth of meaning.”
- Juan Vidal, NPR Books

“Roth’s hotel years came to an abrupt end in the Old World. Thankfully, his account of them, and of the turbulent cross-currents of his age, live on in exquisite collections such as this one.”
- Malcolm Forbes, The American Interest

“Brilliantly perceptive, beautifully crafted and often dripping with mordant wit.”
- Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783781270
• ISBN 13: 9781783781270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Michael Hofmann