Joseph Roth's least-known yet most autobiographical novel begins with a dire warning: T̀he Antichrist has come; so disguised that we...cannot recognize him.' He is in our very midst, cleverly disguised as one of us. It is a race against time as the Antichrist seeks to spread his trickery and to poison the minds of the innocent masses.

Joseph Roth is one of the least-known, yet easily the most accessible of the great twentieth-century writers. His deceptively light, massively concentrated fables of modern history evoke a world of catastrophic change, of disastrous belief and extreme loss. As the century ends, his stature is increasingly appreciated. And British readers, in particular, will find in his stories of a great empire's fall deep echoes of their own experience. ..Granta Books' major programme of republication of Roth's work continues with his last untranslated novel, Rebellion - the story of a Great War veteran, Andreas Pum, who loses a leg and gains a medal. He marries, plays a barrel-organ, and is happy. But when he is imprisoned after a fight life seems unbearably altered. Then a chance encounter with an old comrade who has made his fortune brings Pum to a world where he has a transfiguring experience of justice . . .

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was a superb writer whose compact yet lambent fiction deserves the highest praise (and a much wider readership). The Legend of the Holy Drinker, written and published in the year of his death, is a deeply affecting tale of Andreas, an alcoholic like Roth, who drinks himself to death in the rough houses of Paris. Michael Hoffman's superb translation has rightly garnered much praise. Hoffman stresses that, although often esteemed for the simplicity of his style, Roth is no brutalist: it is the economy and the directness of his writing that is so moving and makes his work so special. Despite its melancholic subject matter The Legend is an uplifting novella. Throughout the tale Andreas, previously an impoverished vagrant, is continuously visited by miraculous good fortune that illuminates the last days of his mendicant existence and lift him, and the reader, to a new understanding of his (our) dissolution.

An intensely beautiful book about one of history’s bleakest periods The Emperor’s Tomb – the last novel Joseph Roth wrote – is a haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a magically evocative paean to the passing of time and the loss of hope. The Emperor’s Tomb runs from 1913 to 1938, from the eve of one world war to the eve of the next, from disaster to disaster. Striped with beauty and written in short propulsive chapters – full of upheavals, reversals and abrupt twists of plot – the novel powerfully sketches a time of change and loss. Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, Roth tells of one man’s foppish, sleepwalking, spoiled youth and then his struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna, financial ruin, and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.