Joseph Roth has always enjoyed critical acclaim in the USA, but his novels were out of print for many years in the UK. In recent years a new generation of readers has discovered this modern master of the laconic, emblematic narrative - an artist responding to the madness of inter-war Europe with an unsentimental humanism. Roth's prose is quick, lucid, and ironic; his fictions read like realist fables. Beneath these polished surfaces darker currents - of violence, hatred, racism and personal loss - cannot be ignored. Granta here presents Roth's collected stories and novellas, in new translations by the poet Michael Hofmann. They include 'Fallermayr the Stationmaster' and 'The Bust of the Emperor', bitter comedies of the last days of the Hapsburgs; 'Strawberries', the story of a small town in Galicia, and many other astonishing shorter fiction.