Joseph Roth

About the Book First published in this country in 1937, and long unavailable English, Confession of a Murderer is a subtle, profoundly moral masterpiece by one of the greatest European novelists of the century, and a terrifying insight into the insidious, corrupting powers of jealousy, ambition and unrequited love. An exile in Paris since the Revolution, the narrator tells of how he grew up, the son of a forester, in the knowledge that his real father was the dissolute, powerful Prince Krapothin; of his futile, begging visit to the Prince in his enormous white place by the sea near Odessa, and his obsessive hatred for Kropotkin's legitimate son; of his wretched, destructive passion for Lutetia, the heartless Paris mannequin; of his enrolment in the Ochrana, the Tsar's dreaded secret police, and the betrayal of the innocent in the cause of his twin obsessions; of the devilish, ubiquitous Jeno Lakatos-dandified, limping, reeking of violets, the emissary from Hell who leads him into the realms of the eternally lost. Vivid, compelling, combining a detailed evocation of prerevolutionary Russia with the moral truths of a parable, Confession of a Murderer is a supreme embodiment of Joseph Roth's belief that' aman's private life, simple humanity, is more important, greater, more tragic, than all the public affairs in the world.' About the Author Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was brought up on the eastern frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; he spent time in Russia during the First World Was and later as a journalist. He left Germany in 1933 and settled in France, where he became a central figure in the intellectual opposition to the Nazis. His novels include Job: The story of a Simple Man and The Emperor's Tomb and The Radetzky March.

"Roth examined the concept of Jewish identity years before the onset of National Socialism and looked ahead with apprehension to Germany's future. Emotionally ravaged by the whirlwind events of Weimar Germany, he dared to write about the historical schism between Eastern and Western Jews, warning of the false comforts of materialism and assimilation and urging his fellow Jews to embrace their heritage and the land of Palestine as a nascent Jewish homeland. As one of Berlin's most eminent journalists, he traveled throughout Europe and composed these essays with both an exigency and restrained contemplation that have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries, Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel.". "By the mid-1930s, as anti-Semitism crested and Roth fled Germany for what he thought were safer climes in Paris, he became increasingly desperate and hobbled by alcoholism. He had tremendous difficulties securing a German publisher, and his powerful 1937 preface, written for what he hoped would be the second edition of The Wandering Jews and included here, was never published in his lifetime."--BOOK JACKET.

The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four pieces--never before translated into English--from 1919 to 1939, beginning in Vienna just at the end of the First War, and ending in Paris with the Second War about to begin. Joseph Roth was the outstanding journalist and commentator of the day. Roth needed journalism to survive; in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. He published an article on average two or three times a week. After 1921, he wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. They sent him on tours through Germany--the Inflation, the occupation, political assassinations, etc.--and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland, Albania, etc., etc. The Hotel Years presents little sequences of feuilleton: on Hotels; Russia; Albania; Pains and Pleasures; Personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s.

"Joseph Roth, the greatest newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for France in 1925 and produced, until his death in 1939, some of the finest writing of his career. Collected here for the first time, Roth's essays form an unrivaled portrait of France in the late 1920s and 1930s - a society at a twentieth-century crossing point - resolute in its desire to preserve a past that was already crumbling while at the same time drawn to the seductive rhythms of urban life. Roth describes a world where the center could not hold - a portrait of a country unknowingly barreling toward social collapse and political anarchy."--BOOK JACKET.

A parable which in few words takes us into the the world of man who is trapped by circumstance and becomes aware that social appearances are not the same as reality. The central character Andreas Plum finds that a series of contingent events reduces him to a vitim of class oppression, snobbery and state organs. As he falls down the social ladder so he loses his illusions, his belief in the German state and eventually in God. The writing is powerful, sharp, like finding images fom Otto Dix and George Grosz translated to verbal narrative. Quite simply brilliant.

A selection of Roth's early journalistic work for Der Neue Tag.

"... Roth's essays record the violent social and political paroxysms that threatened to undo the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic."--Dust jacket.

Bajo qué circunstancias una generación desencantada y sin rumbo puede dejarse vencer por la tentación del totalitarismo? Con su primera novela, “La tela de araña”—que apareció en un periódico vienés en octubre y noviembre de 1923, pocos días antes del ...