Joseph Roth has been described as ?one of the greatest writers in German of this century? ("The Times"). With tragic foresight, "Right and Left," first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth's reportage, recently published as "What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33." After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father's banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother's infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help?a profiteering Russian ?migr? whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation.

Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon's last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica--an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth's signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. "There may be," as James Wood has stated, "no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile."