The Tale of the 1002nd Night

In the first English version of Roth's final novel, a young woman, abandoned by her lover in late nineteenth-century Vienna, is forced into a bordello, where she catches the eye of a Persian shah whose gift, a magnificent string of pearls, has an unexpected impact on her life. 10,000 first printing.

Joseph Roth was born in Galicia in 1894 and became a journalist who worked in Vienna and Berlin until Hitler's rise to power. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he found himself at the center of an intellectual community of exiles. An earlier version of this book was first published in 1937 in Poland, since Roth was no longer able to secure a German publisher. This edition was followed in 1939 with a German-language publication by De Gemeenschap, a Dutch publisher whose copies were confiscated by the Nazis the following year. The author of such classics as The Radetzky March and The Emperor's Tomb, Roth died in Paris in 1939.

Michael Hofmann is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review as well as the author of three volumes of poetry.