Joseph Roth
A Life in Letters
6 March 2012
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
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.”
Reviews
"Hofmann... makes a worthy Virgil through the inferno on display in these pages... Part of the pleasure of reading Joseph Roth—the novels, stories, journalism, letters all—lies in his synthesis of an easily acquired street sapience with a hard-won erudition. He has a 19th-century aesthetic molested by 20th-century crimes, a dignified formalism perverted by an absurdist undertow. Modernity for Roth is a hideous prank played on us by the angel of history." — William Giraldi, Commentary Magazine
"Reading Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters is like sitting across a café table from Roth himself... No standard biography of Roth exists in English, but this collection of his letters, superbly translated and judiciously edited by long-time Roth advocate Michael Hofmann, provides a more intimate portrait than any biography could." — Roger Boylan, Boston Review
Also By: Joseph Roth 
The Hundred Days
Paperback, 2016
Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth
The Hundred Days
E Book, 2016
Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth
The Hotel Years
Paperback, 2015
The first overview of all Joseph Roth’s journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,“I am a hotel citizen, a hotel patriot.”
The Hotel Years
E Book, 2015
The first overview of all Joseph Roth’s journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,“I am a hotel citizen, a hotel patriot.”
The Hundred Days
Hardback, 2015
Napoleon's return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth.
Also By: Michael Hofmann
The Living Statue: A Legend
Paperback, 2024
A newly discovered and translated jewel of a story from the Nobel laureate
Kairos
Paperback, 2024
Now in paperback, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is a dramatic love story that unfolds as the GDR implodes—“an intimate account of obsessive, transgressive passion” (Claire Messud, Harper’s)
Kairos
Hardback, 2023
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates
Pigeons on the Grass
Paperback, 2020
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
Pigeons on the Grass
E Book, 2020
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
Also By: Michael Hofmann
The Living Statue: A Legend
Paperback, 2024
A newly discovered and translated jewel of a story from the Nobel laureateKairos
Paperback, 2024
Now in paperback, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is a dramatic love story that unfolds as the GDR implodes—“an intimate account of obsessive, transgressive passion” (Claire Messud, Harper’s)Kairos
Hardback, 2023
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporatesPigeons on the Grass
Paperback, 2020
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael HofmannPigeons on the Grass
E Book, 2020
Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
