The Antichrist

Unavailable for over seventy years and long out of print in English, The Antichrist is the most mysterious, if not bizarre, of Roth's works, one that has long baffled even some of his many devotees. A dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic, it was written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, composed in cafes across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames.

Joseph Roth was born in Brody, Galicia - then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Ukraine - in 1894. He served in the Austrian Army between 1916 and 1918 and worked as a journalist from 1923 to 1932 in Vienna and Berlin. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he drank himself into an early grave in 1939. Roth was acclaimed for his celebrated novels Weights and Measures, Flight Without End, The Radetzky March, String of Pearls, The Silent Prophet and The Legend of the Holy Drinker.