Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters - Softcover

Joseph Roth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847083412 ISBN 13: 9781847083418

Publisher: Granta Publications Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

The legendary Austro-Hungarian novelist and essayist, Joseph Roth, was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died tragically in Paris in 1939. These letters span the breadth of Roth's life, from his schoolboy years to the veteran of 44, marked by war, poverty, alcoholism, the loss of his wife through madness, and two decades of prolific work. It is a deeply moving portrait of the life of the writer as an outsider; in exile from a world he no longer recognized as his own.

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 and he died in poverty in Paris. Michael Hofmann is the highly acclaimed translator of Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka, and Brecht and the author of several books of poems and book of criticism. He has translated nine previous books by Joseph Roth. He lives in London and Hamburg.

From Booklist

*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: Granta Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847083412
• ISBN 13: 9781847083418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576