Published: 23/02/2012
ISBN: 9781847085474
Granta Books
576 pages

Joseph Roth

Translated by Michael Hofmann

The legendary Austro-Hungarian novelist and essayist, Joseph Roth, was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died tragically in Paris in 1939. These letters span the breadth of Roth’s life, from the schoolboy to the veteran of 44, marked by war, poverty, alcoholism, the loss of his wife through madness, and two decades of prolific work. It is a deeply moving portrait of the life of the writer as an outsider, in exile from a world he no longer recognized as his own.

Fascinating... [An] all-inclusive picture of what it was like to be a writer who only understood the world when he was writing - and wrote magically beautiful books when he did

Julian Evans, Sunday Telegraph

A Life in Letters, impeccably translated and edited by the poet Michael Hofmann, offers a vivid picture of Roth the man... A grand tribute to one of the most grievously disappointed literary geniuses of the 20th century

Ian Thomson, Daily Telegraph

A wonderful selection... Engage with one of the most beguiling and intuitive minds that 20th-century literature has produced

William Boyd, Sunday Times

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 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.

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The Translator

Michael Hofmann is a poet, translator and critic. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse. He recently translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos.

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