The Joseph Roth Collection: Book I: The Bust of Emperor Franz Joseph, Confession of a Murderer, The False Weight (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798199968270)

Three works from the exile years of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - each different in form, all unmistakably Roth.

In The Bust of Emperor Franz Joseph, a Polish count of the old Habsburg world finds himself stranded in a new nation-state that has no language for the kind of belonging he has always taken for granted. His devotion to a vanished empire is treated as an eccentricity. It is, in fact, a form of faith.

In Confession of a Murderer, a Russian exile in a Paris restaurant tells the story of his life to a group of silent listeners - a tale that moves from Odessa to St. Petersburg to revolutionary chaos and into the wreckage of exile, circling always around the question of what a man becomes when the world gives him every reason to be worse than he intended.

In The False Weight, an incorruptible former soldier becomes the inspector of weights and measures in a remote Galician border town where every merchant cheats, every official takes bribes, and honesty is the only thing nobody has any use for. Then he meets a gypsy woman, and his integrity - the one thing he had left - begins to give way.

Published between 1934 and 1937, during the years of Roth's Paris exile, these three works show the full range of a writer who could move between elegy, atmospheric noir, and moral fable without losing, in any register, his precise and devastating intelligence.

By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.