Joseph Roth Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Hotel Savoy (1924)
  2. Rebellion (1924)
  3. Flight Without End (1927)
  4. Zipper and His Father (1928)
  5. Right and Left (1929)
  6. Job (1930)
  7. The Radetzky March (1932)
  8. Tarabas (1934)
  9. The Antichrist (1935)
  10. The Ballad of the Hundred Days (1936)
  11. Confession of a Murderer (1936)
  12. Weights and Measures (1937)
  13. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939)
  14. The Tale of the 1002nd Night (1939)
  15. The Silent Prophet (1966)
  16. The Spider’s Web (1967)
  17. The Emperor’s Tomb (1984)
  18. Perlefter (2012)

Omnibus

  1. Spider’s Web / Zipper and His Father (1990)
  2. Right and Left / Legend of the Holy Drinker (1992)
  3. All Quiet on the Western Front / Job (2004)

Collections

  1. The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth (2001)
  2. The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth (2002)
  3. Three Novellas (2003)
  4. The Coral Merchant (2020)

Novellas

  1. The Leviathan (2011)

Non fiction

  1. The Wandering Jews (1927)
  2. What I Saw (2002)
  3. Report from a Parisian Paradise (2003)
  4. The White Cities (2004)
  5. A Life in Letters (2012)
  6. On the End of the World (2013)
  7. The Hotel Years (2015)

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Joseph Roth Books Overview

The Hotel Savoy

Still bearing scars from the gulag, a freed POW traverses Russia to arrive at the Polish town of Lodz. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself in 1932, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination.

Rebellion

When Andreas Pum returns from World War I, he has lost a leg but gained a medal. Unlike his fellow sufferers, however, Pum maintains his unswerving faith in God, Government, and Authority. He makes his livelihood playing sentimental and patriotic tunes on a barrel organ. Uncomplaining, stupid, and docile, he marries the very recently widowed Katharina shortly after meeting her, and settles down for a winter of ignorant bliss. Disaster strikes soon after. An argument with another man on a tram leads to blows and, unfortunately for Andreas Pum, the other man is of a higher class, and so Pum loses his license to play the barrel organ. His wife is, of course, furious and takes up with another man, leaving Andreas sleeping on the sofa. Things get even worse at his trial. Fed up with being taken for a rebel which he most certainly is not Pum finds himself in prison after striking an official. In a magical touch that only Joseph Roth can pull off, he ages terribly in a matter of weeks. Upon his release he seeks out his former roommate, a pimp named Willi, who now runs a business cleaning lavatories. Andreas, older and older, feeble minded, close to death, and obsessed with the injustice he’s suffered, goes to work for Willi, and dies an embittered old man. Moving along at a breakneck clip, Rebellion, the last of Joseph Roth’s novels to be translated into English, captures the cynicism and upheavals of a postwar society. Its jazz like cadences mix with trenchant, albeit fantastic, social commentary to create a wise parable about justice and society.

Flight Without End

Disillusioned by the new ideologies circulating in Europe after World War I, Franz Tunda is the archetypal modern man taken up by the currents of history.

Right and Left

Joseph Roth has been described as ‘one of the greatest writers in German of this century’ The Times. With tragic foresight, Right and Left, first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth’s reportage, recently published as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33.

After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father’s banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother’s infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help-a profiteering Russian emigre whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation.

Job

Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute Russian Jew and children’s Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees to America with his wife and daughter, further blows of fate await him. In this modern fable based on the biblical story of Job, Mendel Singer witnesses the collapse of his world, experiences unbearable suffering and loss, and ultimately gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune. Born in 1894 in a small Galician town on the border of the Hapsburg Empire, Joseph Roth, author of more than fifteen novels, was one of the central figures of the migr intellectual opposition to the Na*zis. Roth is among the greatest Central European writers of the twentieth century.

The Radetzky March

Strauss’ Radetzky March, signature tune of one of Europe’s most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth’s account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years preceding the Austro Hungarian collapse in 1918. Grandfather, son and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his enoblement; the second for the civil virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct which he cannot attain but against which he is too enfeebled to rebel.

Tarabas

A powerful fable set in the early days of the Russian Revolution, Tarabas is the story of a Russian peasant who learns in his youth from a gypsy that it is his destiny to be both a murderer and saint. It is Roth’s special gift that, in Tarabas‘s fulfillment of his tragic destiny, the larger movements of history find their perfect expression in the fate of one man.

The Antichrist

Unavailable for over seventy years and long out of print in English, The Antichrist is the most mysterious, if not bizarre, of Roth’s works, one that has long baffled even some of his many devotees. A dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic, it was written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Na*zism, composed in cafes across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames.

Confession of a Murderer

In a Russian restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a vivid and compelling story of collaboration, deception, and murder.

The Legend of the Holy Drinker

This book, one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject matter. The Legend of the Holy Drinker was tumed into a film by Enrico Olmi, starring Rutger Hauer.

The Tale of the 1002nd Night

Vienna of the late nineteenth century with its contrasting images of pomp and profound melancholy provides the backdrop for Joseph Roth’s final novel, which he completed in exile in Paris, a few years before his death in 1939. Immersing himself in the perceived glories of a vanished past, Roth tells the tragic story of Mizzi Schinagl, the daughter of a pipemaker, who has fallen in love with a nobleman and cavalry officer a man of a much higher class. Unfortunately for Mizzi, Baron Taittinger, the object of her affection, has liberally bestowed his charms on too many others. Crushed by the Baron’s promiscuities, Mizzi nonetheless finds herself pregnant with his son. Her reputation ruined by the Baron, Mizzi is forced into a bordello after being abandoned by her erstwhile lover. At the same time, the Persian Shah pays a state visit to the Kaiser. Desirous of an affair with and ‘exotic’ Western woman, the Shah conspires with Taittinger to find a consort. When the Shah decides upon a court nobleman’s wife, Taittinger must act quickly to deceive his friend from Persia. Mizzi, surreptitiously chosen for this role, soon finds herself enmeshed in an ironic series of calamitous events in which nothing is what it seems. The tragic lot that befalls Mizzi provides the cornerstone of Roth’s tale, a story of personal and societal ruin set amidst exquisite, wistful descriptions of a waning aristocratic age. In Taittinger, who embodies this spirit of slow decline, Roth has created one of his best ‘uncomprehending heroes’ a decent but essentially frivolous, limited man, completely unequipped to deal with the consequences of his own actions. The Tale of the 1002nd Night is a profound master work of the first order, providing an essential link to our understanding of the extraordinary fictive powers of Joseph Roth.

The Silent Prophet

Examining the mind of a revolutionary and the impersonality of ideology, The Silent Prophet is Roth’s self described Trotsky novel written around 1928 but never published in the author’s lifetime. Based on his own observations during an extended stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926, The Silent Prophet is Roth’s vivid attempt to explain the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by exposing the personal motivations of its leaders. The illegitimate and rootless Friedrich Kargan the Trotsky figure goes compulsorily but willingly into exile in Siberia after openly defying the coldly amoral Savelli the novel’s Stalin figure. Written at the height of speculation about Trotsky’s fate, The Silent Prophet is a brilliant portrayal of revolutionary idealism turned cynicism.

The Emperor’s Tomb

The Emperor’s Tomb is a nostalgic, haunting elegy for the end of youth and the last days of the Austro Hungarian Empire. A continuation of the saga of the von Trotta family from The Radetzky March, it is both a powerful and moving look at a decaying society and its journey through the War and its devastating aftermath, and the story of the erosion of one man’s desperate faith in the virtues of a simple life. AUTHORBIO: Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in a small Galician town on the eastern borders of the Hapsburg Empire. After serving in the Austro Hungarian army from 1916 to 1918, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and in Berlin. He died in Paris in 1939, leaving behind thirteen novels as well as many stories and essays.

Spider’s Web / Zipper and His Father

Two novellas of rare energy and insight, The Spider’s Web and Zipper and His Father are filled with Joseph Roth’s surprising political foresight and compassionate sensitivity to the tremors of a world on the brink of collapse. The Spider’s Web paints a chillingly realistic picture of the conspiracies of the radical right that were to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler and National Socialism to take root among the disenchanted middle clas*ses. Through the eyes of Theodor Lohse, a frustrated and disappointed veteran recently returned from the Great War, Roth shows the dark and powerful attraction of secret right wing organizations to a man deprived of comradeship and military glory by the ennui of civilian life. Driven by anti Semitism and an intense hatred of communism, Lohse assumes various disguises in an underground terrorist network, spreading the evil message of National Socialism through random acts of violence and intimidation. Zipper and his Father is a melancholy evocation of the seedy, unsuccessful lives of lowly clerks lounging in Viennese coffee houses and dreaming of what might have been. Roth charts the shared eccentricities and erratic progress of a father and son in the febrile world of German cinema in the late 1920s.

All Quiet on the Western Front / Job

Both of these classic novels were written during the Weimar period in Germany, 1919 1933. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of Paul Baumer, a young soldier who enlisted in the German army with youthful enthusiasm just before World War I, only to find himself destroyed by the brutality of trench warfare. His poingnant tale is not a treatise on the inhumane nature of combat, but rather the story of one ordinary young man’s life changing experience. As Remarque opens his novel: ‘This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.’ Joseph Roth is a writer who, in the words of Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, is being rediscovered. Job, the Story of a Simple Man tells the tale of Mendel Singer, a Russian emigre on his way to New York. He is confronted by a series of devastating misfortunes that challenge his faith in God. Roth parallels the biblical books of Job in the style of a Yiddish story: his ordinary protagonist survives the worst before experiencing a miracle that restores his faith. Both authors served during World War I, Remarque with the German army and Roth with the Austrians. The shared thread of hope and endurance through these stories serves as a reflection of their times: here are two versions of the young World War I soldier’s experience one a vivid depiction of the reality of combat, the other a parable of faith through life’s trials.

The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth

Appearing in English for the first time, Roth’s novellas and short stories are considered by some to rank with Chekhov’s and Kafka’s as among the greatest of the 20th century. Each of these short works conjures characters and an entire world with breathtaking concision. This book is further evidence of Roth’s genius as a tragic story teller.

The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth

Roth’s novellas and short stories will rank with Chekhov’s and Kafka’s as among the greatest of modern literature. Appearing in English for the first time, The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth is a remarkable achievement, seventeen novellas and stories that echo the intensity and achievement of his greatest novel, The Radetzky March. Spanning the entire range of Roth’s brief life 1894 1939 and including many stories just recently discovered, the book showcases the stunning ‘Strawberries’ 1929, which comprises the first few chapters of a novel Roth would never complete. Here, clearly at the height of his literary prowess, Roth depicts his native town of Brody, a mad little Jewish village given over to mild criminality, yet oddly still ticking along. Similarly breathtaking, indeed reminiscent of Chekhov, are the novellas ‘Stationmaster Fallmerayer’ 1933 and ‘The Bust of the Emperor’ 1935. These short works, each a stunning example of Roth’s legendary explorations of character, reflect an enduring and tragic sensibility that stands alone in the annals of twentieth century fiction.

Three Novellas

The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ tells the haunting story of a dissolute vagrant who is uplifted for a short time by a series of miracles. Written in the final days of Roth’s life, it is a novella of sparkling lucidity and humanity. ‘Fallmerayer the Stationmaster’ and ‘The Bust of the Emperor’ are Roth’s most acclaimed works of shorter fiction.

The Leviathan

Joseph Roth’s final novella, The Leviathan, concerns a shtetl s finest coral merchant and how his dream of seeing the sea for the first time materializes at a terrible cost. In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as the most respected coral merchant of the region. Nissen has never been outside of his town, deep in the Russian interior, and fantasizes that a Leviathan watches over the coral reefs. When the sailor nephew of one of Progrody s residents comes to visit, Nissen loses little time in befriending him for the purpose of learning about the sea. The sailor offers Nissen a once in a lifetime opportunity to come to Odessa and tour his ship. Nissen leaves his business during the peak coral season, and stays in Odessa for three weeks. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into the neighboring town, and his coral is quickly becoming the most sought after. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Piczenik. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself.

The Wandering Jews

A masterpiece of twentieth century history, only recently rediscovered in Germany, appears for the first time in English. Every few decades, a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Elie Wiesel’s Night or Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. In 1927, however, before these works were written, Joseph Roth 1894 1939 composed The Wandering Jews. At the time a correspondent in Berlin, emotionally ravaged by the whirlwind events of Weimar Germany, Roth examined the concept of Jewish identity and questioned what lay in store for it. Whether writing of the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, warning of the false comforts of assimilation, or eerily foreseeing the horrors posed by Na*zism, The Wandering Jews remains as unforgettably vital today as it was when first published.

What I Saw

‘ Joseph Roth is now recognized as one of the twentieth century’s great writers.’ Anthony Heilbut, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for What I Saw, a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, What I Saw introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its ‘nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance’ Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review.

As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin’s official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Na*zis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos.

What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic.

Report from a Parisian Paradise

The wisdom of a lost generation distilled in a bottle of Calvados. At one time an underground hero in the world of journalism, with prose on a par with Tolstoy and Kafka, Joseph Roth now looms large in the pantheon of European literature. Indeed, the last five years have seen a major Roth revival culminating in Report from a Parisian Paradise, a haunting epitaph by the greatest foreign correspondent of his age. An exile in Paris, Roth captured the essence of France in the 1920s and 1930s. From the port town of Marseille to the erotic hill country around Avignon, Report from a Parisian Paradise superbly translated by Michael Hofmann paints the sepia tinted landscapes, enchanting people, and ruthless desperation of a country hurtling toward dissolution. Roth’s book is not only a paean to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work of transcendent philosophical clarity. 6 illustrations

A Life in Letters

The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth with Kafka, Mann, and Musil in the twentieth century literary canon. 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.

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