Three Novellas: The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Fallmerayer the Stationmaster and the Bust of Th

A sumptuous, mordant, and richly pleasing trio of smartly-written short stories from Roth, master chronicler of the Mitteleuropean interregnum. Filled with human colour utterly absent from other better known authors of the period, Roth captures not only the time and place, but feel and flavour, of a fascinating - and crucial - cultural moment one can only otherwise approximate in the music of Berg, Zemlinsky, Gurlitt, and the entartete musik crowd. A truly wonderful entree to the works of Joesph Roth.

The translations of Roth's stories offered in this slim volume are all the more extraordinary in that they allow the reader to walk next to the stories' narrators as they describe their settings and characters. Whether it is the simple peasants who don't comprehend the end of an empire in their sleepy little village, a clochard with a debt, or a simple stationmaster who longs for love and life, Roth holds these simple characters up as icons of a time and world that struggles with the progress of politics, morals, and perspectives. I recommend these stories for the beauty of the language and the beauty of Roth's gift of storytelling.