Roth's prose is quick, lucid and ironic; his fictions read like realist fables. Granta here presents his stories and novellas in new translations by the poet Michael Hofman.

"Roth's prose is quick, lucid and ironic; his fictions read like realist fables. Granta here presents his stories and novellas in new translations by the poet Michael Hofman."

A collection of seventeen novellas and stories, including "The triumph of beauty," an elegiac tale of love and loss; "The bust of the emperor," which explores the effects of war on a man's life; and, "Stationmaster Fallmerayer," a tragic love story about an exotic beauty and a lowly stationmaster. -- Back cover.

The tumultuous life of the Austrian writer best known for "The Radetzky March" is described through letters that recall his father's and wife's mental illnesses, numerous mistresses, and travel to Paris.

Seventeen stories from one of Europe's most enchanting cities.

New translations of the six greatest short stories by Joseph Roth, collected in a beautiful edition Joseph Roth's sensibility--both clear-eyed and nostalgic, harshly realistic and tenderly humane--produced some of the most distinctive fiction of the twentieth century. This collection of his most essential stories, in exquisite new translations by Ruth Martin, showcases the astonishing range and power of his short stories and novellas. In prose of aching beauty and precision, Roth shows us isolated souls pursuing lost ideals and impossible desires. Forced to remove a bust of the fallen Austrian emperor from his house, an eccentric old count holds a funeral for it and intends to be buried in the same plot himself; a humble coral merchant, dissatisfied with his life and longing for the sea, chooses to adulterate his wares with false coral, with catastrophic results; young Fini, just entering the haze of early sexuality, falls into an unsatisfying relationship with an older musician. With the greatest craft and sensitivity, Roth unfolds the many fragilities of the human heart.

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.