Vienna of the late nineteenth century, with its contrasting images of pomp and profound melancholy, provides the backdrop for Joseph Roth's final novel, which he completed in exile, a few years before his tragic death in 1939. The Tale of the 1002nd Night is a brilliant, allegorical tale of seduction and personal and societal ruin, set amidst exquisite, wistful descriptions of a waning aristocratic age, and provides an essential link to our understanding of Roth's extraordinary fictive powers.
It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and One Nights has had a major influence on European and world literature. This study analyses the influence of Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th-century prose from all over the world. Works of approximately forty authors are examined: those who were crucial to the development of the main currents in 20th-century fiction, such as modernism, magical realism and post-modernism. The book contains six thematic sections divided into chapters discussing two or three authors/works, each from a narratological perspective and supplemented by references to the cultural and literary context. It is shown how Thousand and One Nights became deeply rooted in modern world literature especially in phases of renewal and experiment.
Unravels an internationally esteemed author's quest for a homeland A writer described as a "Jew in search of a fatherland" and a "wanderer in flight toward a tragic end," the Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939) spent his life in pursuit of a national and cultural identity and his final years writing in fervent opposition to the Third Reich. In this introduction to Roth's novels, which include Job and The Radetzky March, Sidney Rosenfeld demonstrates how the experience of homelessness not only shaped Roth's life but also decisively defined his body of work. Rosenfeld suggests that more than any other component of Roth's varied fiction, his skillful portrayals of uprootedness and the search for home explain his international appeal, which has grown in recent decades with the translation of his works into English. Rosenfeld examines Roth's obsession with the question of belonging, tracing it to his boyhood in the Slavic-Jewish Austrian Crown land of Galicia. Illustrating how Roth's quest determined his most typical themes and gave rise to the Jewish-Slavic melancholy that permeates his narratives, Rosenfeld includes readings of the early novels. Through this fiction Roth quickly established his reputation as a literary chronicler of both the final years of the Habsburg monarchy and the lost world of East European Jewry. Rosenfeld describes Roth's flight from Berlin upon Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933, and his precarious existence as an exile. While copies of Roth's works went up in flames in Nazi book burnings, the novelist moved from one European city to another, living in hotels and writing at café tables. From the time of his exile until his death in Paris just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Roth produced six novels, as well as shorter works of fiction and a steady flow of journalism denouncing the Third Reich. Rosenfeld's critical readings of the novels written during Roth's exile connect them with the novelist's prescient estimate of Hitler's intentions and his own longing for a sovereign Austria.
While visiting Vienna, the Shah of Persia falls for a beautiful countess. The Austrian officials arrange for him to spend the night with the countess, but unbeknown to the Shah she is a prostitute who merely resembles the countess. From this night follows a chain of ruinous consequences.
The tumultuous life of the Austrian writer best known for "The Radetzky March" is described through letters that recall his father's and wife's mental illnesses, numerous mistresses, and travel to Paris.
A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voices The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations — inspired by Sumerian tablets — are threaded throughout this powerful book.
An exiled Russian spy shares his dramatic life story from a Paris restaurant in this novel by the author of The Radetzky March. In a Russian restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a wild story of collaboration, deception, and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution. Praise for Confession of a Murderer “Worthy to sit beside Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s excursions into the twisted world of secret agents. Joseph Roth is one of the great writers in German of this century; and this novel is a fine introduction to this view of intrigue, necessity, and moral doubt.” —The Times (London)
The lives of a group of Romanian students under Communism, with its poverty, regimentation and depressing greyness. Life gets no better after graduation, so much so that several commit suicide.
A showcase of one hundred of the world's most significant books offers the author's introductory essays on such writers as James Boswell, Colette, and Joseph Roth, and includes explorations of a range of genres and specific works.
The author’s masterpiece, an epic saga of a family and an empire in decline, is “full of psychological penetration and tragic force” (The New Yorker). The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s classic novel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, follows three generations of the privileged von Trotta family as Europe advances inexorably toward World War I. With a breadth and richness that draws comparison to Tolstoy, it encompasses the entire social fabric of Austro-Hungarian society. Shot through with dark humor and tragic irony, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such a universal story for our times. “A masterpiece . . . The totality of Joseph Roth’s work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. No other contemporary writer, not excepting Thomas Mann, has come close to achieving the wholeness . . . that Lukács cites as our impossible aim.” —Nadine Gordimer
