Now available for the first time in English, this important addition to the Roth canon is rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation A novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death, this book chronicles the life and times of Alexander Perlefter, the well-to-do Austrian urbanite with whom his relative, a small-town narrator, Naphthali Kroj, has come to live after becoming orphaned. The colorful cast of characters includes Perlefter's four children: foolish Alfred, with his predilection for sleeping with servant girls and widows and boasting of the venereal diseases he contracts; the hapless Karoline, whose interest in math and physics and employment at a scientific institute seem to repel serious suitors; the flamboyant Julie, a sweet, pale, and anemic girl who likes any man who is inclined toward marriage; and the beautiful and flighty Margarete, besotted with a professor of history. Written circa 1928-30, Perlefter represents Joseph Roth at the very peak of his literary powers—it was penned just after the publication of The Silent Prophet and just before his masterpieces Job and The Radetzky March.

Because he is born illegitimate, Friederich Kargan lacks even a social identity. Moving to Vienna, he becomes involved both in revolutionary agitation and a love affair before he is caught by the authorities on his first trip to Russia, enduring a Siberian interlude before escaping. He eventually returns to Russia after the February Revolution, becoming leader of the Red Army, but realizes during the civil war that the revolution seems to be over before it has begun; the cause has been betrayed, yesterday’s proletariat has become today’s bourgeoisie; exile might offer the only choice. A beautifully descriptive journey from loneliness into an illusory worldliness and back into loneliness, this is a haunting study in alienation by a master of realistic imagination.

Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute Eastern-European Jew and children’s Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees with his wife and daughter, further blows of fate await him. In this modern fable based on the biblical story of Job, Mendel Singer witnesses the collapse of his world, experiences unbearable suffering and loss, and ultimately gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune.

Long out of print in English, this dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic has less to do with religion than with what Roth sees as the disintegrating moral fabric of the modern world Written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, this work was composed in cafés across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames. Such events no doubt influence the apocalytic tones of The Antichrist's protaganist, J.R., a journalist hired by an inscrutable media mogul hellbent on exposing evidence of the "Antichrist" throughout the world. This mission leads J.R. to authoritarian political regimes such as Red Earth (the Soviet Union) but also other poisonous terrains like The Land of Shadows (Hollywood)—it becomes all too clear that it is Roth's mission to chart the whole of civilization's slide into moral and political chaos. But herein lies the extraordinary strength and appeal of this work, as Roth is powerfully and even hilariously prescient. Mixing the diatribe with his trademark sardonic wit, he miraculously predicts the advent of the Holocaust, globalization, multimedia—even the paparazzi. Combining beautiful but savage writing with visual imagery out of a Coen Brothers movie, this is an invaluable addition to the Roth canon in English.

Written in the final days of Roth's life, it is a novella of sparkling lucidity and humanity. "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" and "The Bust of the Emperor" are Roth's most acclaimed works of shorter fiction.

The Radetzky March charts the history of the Trotta family through three generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through the Battle of Solferino to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's intelligent compassion illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.

The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First World War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World War. Roth, the great journalist of his day, needed journalism to survive: in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. Beginning in 1921, Roth wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung who sent him on assignments throughout Germany - the inflation, the occupation, political assassinations - and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland and Albania. And always: “I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid.”

A continuation of the saga of the von Trotta family from The Radetzky March, it is both a powerful and moving look at a decaying society and its journey through the War and its devastating aftermath, and the story of the erosion of one man's desperate faith in the virtues of a simple life.

Still bearing scars from the gulag, a freed POW traverses Russia to arrive at the Polish town of Lodz. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself in 1932, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination.

'Every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one'At his wife's insistence, upstanding citizen and artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian army and takes up a civilian post, as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a remote backwater near the Russian border. At first he does everything by the book, but gradually he finds himself adrift in a world of petty corruption, bribery and drunkenness - and undone by his passion for the beautiful gypsy Euphemia. A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in the early twentieth century, Weights and Measures is also the story of the disintegration of a good man.Translated by David Le Vay

While the rest of Joseph Roth's oeuvre has been made available to the English-speaking world in recent years, this new translation by Richard Panchyk – a distant relative of Roth – will redress the historical absence of such a key, neglected work in the Roth canon. Roth penned and published The Antichrist during the first years of his exile from his homeland, and an English translation was published in London, in 1935 by William Heinemann. The Antichrist's singularity amongst Joseph Roth's work stems both from the urgency that courses through its prose and the book's hybrid form, which seems simultaneously to straddle the novel, journalism and memoir. Though Roth himself referred proudly to this book as a novel, it is not easy to classify. In fact, at first glance one may be inclined to call it a series of interconnected essays, but it becomes clear that Antichrist is certainly more novel than essay. The Antichrist has less to do with religion than with what Roth...