Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

HOFMANN, Michael (ed.)

ISBN 10: 1847083404 / ISBN 13: 9781847083401

Published by Granta Publications, London, 2012

About this Item

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. Frontispiece, some black & white photographic illustrations. 551 pages. Thick 8vo, black cloth with red lettering at spine, d.w. (with added mylar wrapper). London: Granta Publications, (2012). First British edition. A fine copy in a fine dust wrapper.

Seller Inventory # 319074

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters
• Publisher: Granta Publications, London
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847083404
• ISBN 13: 9781847083401
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First.
• Condition: fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • EUROPE
  • JOURNALISM
  • 20TH CENTURY
  • BIOGRAPHY
  • AUSTRIA

About this title

Synopsis

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 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.