JOSEPH ROTH (1894-1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist who, particularly in his later novels, mourned the passing of an age of stability he saw represented by the last pre-World War I years of the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary.  His work is concise and emotionally forthright, with a style that harks back to the nineteenth century realists, and concerns the dilemma of individual moral heroes in a time of decadence and moribund traditions.

Roth achieved moderate early success as a novelist with a series of books exploring life in post-war Europe.  He often portrayed the fate of homeless wanderers looking for a place to live.  His first (unfinished) novel, THE SPIDER'S WEB (1923), was serialized in an Austrian newspaper.  In HOTEL SAVOY (1924) a freed POW from the gulag traverses Russia to arrive at the massive Hotel Savoy, where he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield.  THE SILENT PROPHET (1929) is a haunting study in alienation in which the protagonist returns to Russia from abroad after the February Revolution, becoming a leader of the Red Army, but realizes that the revolution seems to be over before it has begun, that the cause has been betrayed, and that exile might offer the only choice.

From 1930, Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned, and began to evoke a melancholic nostalgia for life in imperial Central Europe before 1914.  His longing for a more tolerant past may be partly explained as a reaction against the nationalism of the time, which culminated in Nazism.  THE RADETZKY MARCH (1932), Roth's best-known work, is typical of this later phase.  It chronicles the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire via the story of the privileged von Trotta family.  Mario Vargas Llosa ranked the book as the best political novel ever written.  Roth's continues his account of the von Trotta family in THE EMPEROR'S TOMB (1938), which describes the fate of a cousin of the hero of Radetzky March up to Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938.  Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, Roth tells of one man's foppish, sleepwalking, spoiled youth and then his struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna, financial ruin, and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.

According to his main English translator, Michael Hofmann, Roth "one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period."  His seminal essay THE WANDERING JEWS (1927) is a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.  WHAT I SAW (2003) collects his reportage from the era of the Weimar Republic, recording the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy of those years.  The essays in REPORT FROM A PARISIAN PARADISE (2003) form an unrivalled portrait of France in the late 1920s and 1930s, describing a country barreling toward social collapse and political anarchy.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:


                               == FICTION ==

* Antichrist, The (Peter Owen, 2010).  Translated by Richard Panchyk.

* Confession of a Murderer (Overlook, 2003).  Translated by Desmond Vesey.

* Emperor's Tomb, The (New Directions, 2013).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Flight Without End (Overlook, 2003).  Translated by David Le Vay.

* Hotel Savoy (Overlook, 2003).  Translated by John Hoare.

* Hundred Days, The (New Directions, 2014).  Translated by Richard Panchyk.

* Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Archipelago / Overlook, 2010).  Translated by Ross Benjamin.

* Legend of the Holy Drinker (Overlook, 1992).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Leviathan, The (New Directions, 2011).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois (Peter Owen, 2013).  Translated by Richard Panchyk.

* Radetzky March, The (Penguin Classics, 2000).  Translated by Joachim Neugroschel.

* Radetzky March, The (Overlook, 1983).  Translated by Eva Tucker. -- PDF

* Rebellion (Picador, 2000).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Right and Left (Overlook, 2004).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Silent Prophet, The (Peter Owen, 2001).  Translated by David Le Vay.

* Spider's Web, The / Zipper and His Father (Overlook, 1989).  Translated by John Hoare. -- PDF

* Tale of the 1002nd Night (St Martins, 2011).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Tarabas: A Guest on Earth (Picador, 1988).  Translated by Winifred Katzin. -- PDF


                              == NON-FICTION ==

* Hotel Years, The (New Directions, 2015).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939 (Norton, 2003).  Translated by Michael Hofmann. -- PDF

* Wandering Jews, The (Norton, 2000).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

* What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 (Norton, 2003).  Translated by Michael Hofmann.

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