Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939

Joseph Roth (1894-1939), the greatest newpaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925. His essays from "Report from a Parisian Paradise" evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. So prophetic were Roth's perceptions of a world where "the girls became increasingly more lost and innocent" that he increasingly resorted to drink to douse his vision of a conflagration that could not be averted. From the port town of Marseille to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon Roth's, and from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, Roth's book is a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold.