The white cities

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.