Joseph Roth

An unforgettable portrait of the Austro-Hungarian author of The Radetzky March, this biography in letters - selected here for the first time by Michael Hofmann - is classic European literature at its finest

Fascinating... [An] all-inclusive picture of what it was like to be a writer who only understood the world when he was writing - and wrote magically beautiful books when he did

A Life in Letters, impeccably translated and edited by the poet Michael Hofmann, offers a vivid picture of Roth the man... A grand tribute to one of the most grievously disappointed literary geniuses of the 20th century

A wonderful selection... Engage with one of the most beguiling and intuitive minds that 20th-century literature has produced

This volume of letters will both move and dismay Roth readers while testifying to the towering humanity, warts and all, of one of the finest writers of the 20th century... For those who have not yet explored Roth's writings, now is the time

These are extraordinary letters, as finely written as any letters of the century in a dark, impassioned, suffering cause

These letters prove the ideal medium to get to know a man who resisted conventional biography, occluding his own life in myth

If there is any justice in the world and Joseph Roth does at last find the mass reading public he deserves, the lion's share of credit will have to go to Michael Hofmann

It is a scandal that such an important correspondence should have waited more than four decades to be translated.... Michael Hoffman is to be congratulated on resurrecting Roth as the Everyman of Emigration

Roth's letters give us great insight into one of the outstanding writers of the 20th century and to the terrible times he lived through

Roth ranks among the great writers of Mitteleuropa, and for English readers who love his work, this [book is] hugely valuable

A fascinating window on a disillusioned man and the times he lived through

JOSEPH ROTH (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty several years later. His novels include What I Saw, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, The Emperor's Tomb and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books. MICHAEL HOFMANN is the highly acclaimed translator of Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka, and Brecht and the author of several books of poems and book of criticism. He has translated nine previous books by Joseph Roth. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.