The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars

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.

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.