Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth’s ‘The Excavation’ is part of an unfinished novel, ‘Strawberries’.

Story: ‘The Excavation’

Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, 4 January 2001

The summer​ lay there, waiting to finish. Autumn was when the strangers were expected, the hop merchants from Austria, Germany and England, the rich men off whom many people in our town made their livings.

The summer lay there, and it spawned various illnesses. People got belly-aches and died from eating rotten fruit, the water ran out in the wells, a couple of pine forests burned down, and...

Empire of Signs: Joseph Roth

James Wood, 4 March 1999

With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling...

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Conspiratorial Hapsburger

Michael Hofmann, 5 March 1987

When Joseph Roth was asked once to write about his earliest memory, he described how as a baby he had seen his mother strip his cradle and hand it over to a strange woman, who ‘holds it to...

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Nobody is God

Robert Taubman, 4 February 1982

Rabbit novels come out at the turn of each decade, like a series of reports on the state of America. Rabbit is rich, the third and latest, takes place in Brewster, Pennsylvania, from June 1979...

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