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The White Cities book cover
The White Cities
Reports From France, 1925 39
1976
First Published
3.86
Average Rating
178
Number of Pages
Joseph Roth, the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925 and, as an Austrian Jew, was exiled there for the rest of his life. Collected together here for the first time in English, these exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon; from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, White Cities is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a beautifully crafted and revelatory work. Joseph Roth died of an alcohol-related illness in a Paris hospital in 1939.
Avg Rating
3.86
Number of Ratings
203
5 STARS
24%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
29%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann
Author · 10 books

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently One Lark, One Horse. Among his translations are plays by Bertolt Brecht and Patrick Süskind; the selected poems of Durs Grünbein and Gottfried Benn; and novels and stories by, among others, Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage, and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front, Kurt Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm, and edited The Voyage That Never Ends, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida. He is the son of German novelist Gert Hofmann (1931-1993).

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