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Appearing in English for the first time, Roth's novellas and short stories are considered by some to rank with Chekhov's and Kafka's as among the greatest of the 20th century. Each of these short works conjures characters and an entire world with breathtaking concision. This book is further evidence of Roth's genius as a tragic story teller. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Short fiction as great as his novels
In recent years, Joseph Roth has emerged as one of my very favourite writers.It is quite a puzzle that the author of such works as The Radetzky March, Job and Rebellion remains largely unknown to so many English-speaking readers - and even those well acquainted with modern European literature, and the likes of Thomas Mann.Several wonderful translators - not least of them, the poet Michael Hoffman - are helping to correct this sorry situation.Hoffman's rendition of The Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth is the latest service in a great cause, as it shows Roth also had a gift for short fiction.With his characteristic lyricism, and precise depiction of conflicted, and all-too-human characters, Roth creates several more memorable stories.Anyone familiar with Roth's work might recognize the haunting Stationmaster Fallmerayer, as this is perhaps the best known work in this collection.Certainly they will recognize Stationmaster as vintage Roth, once read, as it is redolent of the writer's unique ability to capture the simple tragedy of simple lives, sensitively, but without sentimentality.The same can be said of The Bust of the Emperor, which contains echoes of the novel The Emperor's Tomb.A particular favourite of mine was Barbara, the responsible mother, "Didn't the name sound like hard labor", who knows responsibility to her son, but perhaps not to herself.How many writers, Chekhov aside, can distil with such poignancy a character's whole emotional life in a mere eight brief pages?

It is a glorious collection.Buy it, read it, keep it by your side for future reference.

A touch melancholic, but a delightful collection of stories
I had no idea who Joseph Roth was. Then I discovered his collection of short stories.

As you read the `Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth', you'll marvel at his language - his remarkable talent for using simple words to evoke pictures and feelings deep in your mind. Consider, for instance, "...the perfumed lilac breathed, the blackbirds sang, the month of May came giggling out of the undergrowth..." from `The Honors Student', the very first story in his collection. Or, "The woodpeckers were already hammering at the trees. It rained a lot..." his opening sentences from `Strawberries' - another touching tale. And, like me, you'll discover the world of Joseph Roth, thanks largely to Michael Hofmann's translation.

There are seventeen stories in this collection, all of them wonderfully entertaining. A few of them are long enough to be novellas, but that's a bonus. Roth writes about small towns, men living in the past, women compelled to wasting their years, and childhoods cut short by necessity. His characters are so real that you'll feel you might have known some of them, sometime in your life. Each story is a touch melancholic, sometimes even tragic. But his words seem to live on forever.

What you'll also find running through Roth's stories is an obsession with the past, or at least, a preoccupation with maintaining status quo. Perhaps, it's a reflection of his own inability in accepting the changes in his life: World War I, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the rise of nationalism and Nazi Germany. A point he clearly laments in `The Bust of the Emperor': "They are no longer content to be divided into peoples, no! - it seems they're hell-bent on belonging to different nations. Nationalism - get this, Solomon?! - Not even monkeys could have come up with that one."

But melancholy and his obsession with the past are not the only elements that drive these stories. Roth weaves in humour too. Take for instance this description from `Barbara': "He patted Barbara's cheeks, and it felt to her like five little piglets scrabbling over her face." Or, this passage in `The Triumph of Beauty': "She fell to her knees and kissed my friend's toe-caps. He couldn't fight her off. She slapped him as well. Then, she collapsed on the floor, lifeless as a doll. It wasn't possible to lift her up. She seemed to be welded to the carpet."

Joseph Roth's words are wonderfully simple, his descriptions vivid, and his stories, entertaining. A touch melancholic perhaps, but a delightful collection. Read and enjoy!
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Product Description
Joseph Roth was one of the most significant German-language writers of the interwar period, yet few major studies of his work have been published in English. Kati Tonkin's monograph spans Roth's novelistic career, challenging the widely held assumption that his writing can be divided into an early "socialist" and a later "monarchist" phase: that his late novels Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft are deeply nostalgic, presenting an idealized picture of the Habsburg Empire, a "backward-turned utopia." In contrast, Tonkin reads the later works not as escapist but as attempts to grasp the reasons for the failure of the empire. The historical context in which Roth operated -- that of the late empire and its successor states -- has been a focus of renewed interest since the end of the Cold War, as Central Europe re-emerges as a region with a distinct historical and cultural identity steeped in multinational Habsburg traditions, and Central European nations accede to the European Union. This book will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of early-20th-century Central European literature, history, and culture; of the socio-cultural environment of the late Habsburg Empire; of Jewish identity in German-speaking Central Europe; and of national identity in the multinational context. ... Read more

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Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2002 im Fachbereich Germanistik - Neuere Deutsche Literatur, Note: sehr gut, Universität Wien (Deutsche Philologie), 235 Eintragungen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Anmerkungen:Corpus: Das falsche Gewicht, Radetzkymarsch, Die Kapuzinergruft. , Abstract: Schon bei den ersten Begegnungen mit Roths Werk fällt die eigenartig bedrückte Atmosphäre auf. Die Figuren seiner erzählerischen Welt erweisen sich als Melancholiker, die sich jedoch hinter zahlreichen Masken verbergen. Sie versuchen auf diese Weise ihre Unzufriedenheit, ihre Mediokrität, ihre Ängste zu verhüllen, die Unmöglichkeit, sich in ihrer Welt zurechtzufinden zu überspielen. Diese latent melancholische Struktur ist sehr auffallend bei seinen militärischen Charakteren, etwa bei Eichmeister Eibenschütz in Das falsche Gewicht, Carl Joseph Trotta und seinem Vater, sowie dem Freund Carl Josephs, Dr. Demant, im Radetzkymarsch. Nicht nur die Militärs leiden jedoch unter der Last der verborgenen Melancholie. In der Kapuzinergruft wird besonders die junge Generation des Großbürgertums hinter ihrer Oberflächlichkeit von tiefer Melancholie beherrscht. Dieser Melancholie der meisten Figuren Roths, ihren Hintergründen und vor allem ihren Masken in der erzählerischen Gestaltung durch Joseph Roth auf die Spur zu kommen, war der Ausgangspunkt der vorliegenden Arbeit und ihr vordringliches Erkenntnisinteresse. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Joseph Roth," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Joseph Roth in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Joseph Roth when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Joseph Roth, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the first monograph on the work of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) to be published in English by a British-based academic, and should prove useful both to those with a specialized interest in Roth, whose novels and journalism continue to gain admirers around the world, and to those interested more broadly in an extraordinarily rich period in twentieth century European culture. It serves both as an introduction to the early part of a body of work whose variety and volume were for many years overshadowed by the reputation of the historical novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), and as a re-assessment of Roth's writing, both of fiction and of journalism, within the modern tradition. A perceived fragmentation of social, political, cultural and other traditions was a particular concern for Roth, as for many contemporaries, and the thematic chapters present a detailed contextual survey of Roth's intense and often ambivalent engagement with aspects of modern life, including travel, gender, technology, the city, and cinema. Besides assessing the continuities and discontinuities in Roth's attitudes, these chapters examine how his responses to the contemporary world impact upon both the form and content of his writing. The author argues that Roth's writing of the 1920s should be considered modernist not just in its often prescient sensitivity to cultural and political developments, but in its employment of a formal aesthetics and narrative self-consciousness which eventually made possible the illusory wholeness of the later fiction. ... Read more