Product Description
As a socialist monarchist, Jewish Catholic, sceptical mystic, and humorous sage, Roth has never fitted neatly into any one literary or historical category. The essays in this volume, devoted to the Austrian writer Joseph Roth on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in Paris in 1939, take a fresh look at his apparent contradictions and demonstrate his contemporary relevance as an acute analyst of the relationship between private life and political change. ... Read more

Product Description
Joseph Roth, the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925 and, as an Austrian Jew, was exiled there for the rest of his life. Collected together here for the first time in English, these exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon; from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, White Cities is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a beautifully crafted and revelatory work. Joseph Roth died of an alcohol-related illness in a Paris hospital in 1939. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Another Edition?
I'm almost certain this is the same compendium of of 'fugitive' writings by Joseph Roth, translated by the same Michael Hofmann, as the book titled "Report from a Parisian Paradise", which I've reviewed recently. The unpublished travel manuscript "White Cities" is the best portion of the "Parisian Paradise" collection. Here's my review of that book:

I've Been Underestimating Joseph Roth

I thought I knew the full range of his gifts. I've been singing his virtues as one of the great fiction writers of the 20th C, the skeptical, ironic observer in his novellas of the collapse of the old European culture following World War 1, virtually unmatched in his ability to narrate sorrow in the simplest language. I've been awed by the Prophetic Roth. Now I find, especially in his travel writings, another Roth, a troubadour poet capable of lyrical joy when the subject is suited to poetry. That subject, above all, was France -- French history and culture, French freedom and tolerance, French grit and resilience, all in marked comparison to the state of society in the Germany sinking ever deeper into the muck of Nazism. On his first visit in 1925, Roth wrote of his first impression of 'southern/Roman' France:

"It takes eight hours to get from Paris to Lyons. On the way there is avery sudden change in the landscape. You come out of a tunnel into an abruptly southern scene. Precipitous slopes, split rocks revealing their inner geology, a deeper green, soft, pale-blue smoke of a stronger, decidedly cerulean hue. A couple of clouds stand idly and massively on the horizon, as if they weren't haze but dark stone. All things have sharper edges; the air is still; its waves don't flatten forms. Each has its unalterable contours. Nothings hovers and havers here. There is perfect conviction in everything, as if the objects were better informed about themselves and the position they took up in the world. Here you don't wonder. You don't have a hunch. You know."

But don't suppose that Roth will always romanticize Romance, that is, the Romance culture of ever-Roman France. He can and will notice what's sordid and false there also, especially among those French who are inclined to accommodate the worst in Germany. Joseph Roth has been widely misperceived as an author of Nostalgia, with a conservative yen for the hallowed verities of pre-War Hapsburg Austria-Hungary. It just isn't so. Roth was bitterly disaffected from many aspects of 'modernity' -- and who could fault that, considering that his 'modern times' were the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, the vilest era in human history -- but if he craved a different time, his nostalgia was for a better Future, not a revivified mummy Past. Visiting Avignon, one of his visionary "white cities", he declares precisely what it is that he esteems in France:

"Will the world ever come to look like Avignon? The ridiculous fear of the nations, and of the European nations at that, that they might lose this or that 'characteristic feature' and that the colorful humanity might mix into a gray mush! But people aren't pigments, noris the world a palette! The more mixing, the more characteristics! I won't live to see the beautiful world in which every individual can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a future, as I sit in the Place de l'Horloge in Avignon, and see all the races in the world in the features of a policeman, a beggar, a waiter. That for me is the highest stage of human evolution..." In other words, the world Roth craved was forever a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic world. Later, in a nother essay, he bravely and enthusiastically advocates a 'unified Europe' -- in essence an even more "common market" of mingling cultures than our piffling current EU -- but one that can only be achieved by the exclusion/quarantine of the Third Reich and the renunciation of all stenches of nationalism.

This volume, Report from a Parisian Paradise, is not a book assembled by Joseph Roth himself. It's a very skillful translation, by Michael Hofmann, of a congeries of newspaper columns, letters, diary entries, and unpublished essays, assembled by a German editor in 1999. Frankly, the collection as a 'whole' is not exactly equal to the sum of the parts; I'd suggest disarticulating its sections and reading them separately for maximum impact. The centerpiece of the volume is Roth's unpublished (perhaps unfinished) travel account called "The White Cities, a 72-page essay in travel writing that I think would/should stand alone, and that seems to me a portent of the superb travel-based books of W.G. Sebald. In "The White Cities", Roth is more explicit and lucid in expounding his social vision than in any of his other writings.

But Report from a Parisian Paradise alsoincludes several dozen of Roth's extremely pungent and/or poignant brief articles written for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and for various less prepossessing journals in the 1930s. Roth was a fabulously successful, highly-paid newspaper feature-writer, until he was forced into relative silence for his sharp criticisms of the rising Nazi party. There is a huge, excruciatingly sad difference in tone between the playful wit of his pieces from '25 and '26 and the eloquent anger of his writings in the 1930s. Only the unfailing literary brilliance of the 50 pieces in this book binds them together; otherwise, they are as discontinuous as the years of Roth's life and the places where he passed those years. His "Parisian Paradise", by the way, was a dingy dance club, a downstairs dump with taxi-dancers, cheap drinks, and a determination to survive life. ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Product Description
While visiting Vienna, the Shah of Persia falls for abeautiful countess. The Austrian officials arrange for him to spendthe night with the "countess", but unbeknown to the Shah she is aprostitute who merely resembles the countess. From this night followsa chain of ruinous consequences.

The String of Pearls has also been published under the titleThe Tale of the 1002nd Night. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Duplicate Titles
This book is identical with "The Tale of the 1002nd Night," and was simply issued in England under a different title.

"In this short book there is enough for many books."
This quotation from the introduction by Michael Hofmann, poet andtranslator of four Roth novels, highlights both the delights andlimitations of this book.While it has all the ingredients for a greatlyexciting read and touches on all aspects of society in the Austro-Hungarianempire--worlds of the court, the army, journalism, night life, the law,popular entertainment, and even prostitution--it really doesn't draw you inor involve you.There's a curious disconnect between the characters andthe reader, akin in many ways to the disconnect between most of thecharacters and each other, perhaps because there are many of them in thisshort novel. The visit of the Shah of Persia and his one-night-stand with ayoung Viennese woman provide fertile ground for wonderful dialogue andlyrical descriptions, but the characters are like exhibits in the waxmuseum which plays a part in the conclusion of the novel. In short, thisnovel is intriguing primarily for its detailed and exacting recreation ofan historical context, but its large scope and small size act as barriersto reader involvement. ... Read more

Product Description
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 writings 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 crippies, the Jewish immigrants, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues - as well as the more whimsical aspects of the city - the public parks and the burgeoning entertainment industry. Warning early on of the threat posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty, creating in the process a memorable portrait of a city. ... Read more

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Mizzi Schinagl will ein bisschen Liebe, kann sie aber weder von einem Mann noch vom eigenen Sohn bekommen. ... Read more