"I am a citizen of hotels. A patriot of hotels."

"The hotel, which I love like my homeland, is located in one of the great European ports, and the heavy golden letters-antiques, with which its banner name is written (shining above the roofs of the houses, softly ascending) are in my eyes metallic flags, raised small banners that greet by sparkling instead of waving".

In the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Roth traveled extensively in a crisis-ridden Europe, wandering from hotel to hotel and writing about the places he passed through. Acute, nostalgic, full of curiosity and deeply observant - gathered here for the first time by Roth's English translator Michael Hofmann - his articles paint the picture of a continent torn apart by the relentless violence of change, simultaneously hooked on tradition.

From the Baltic, Hamburg, Vienna, Marseille, Poland, the Volga, the tyrannical gyms of the Albanian army, the crumbling "wells" of the new oil capital in Galicia, and the dissolved bazaars, the houses cut in half to make Tirana a modern capital, to the distinct, peculiar people that Roth meets in the hotels where he stays, these vignette-texts are tender and intoxicating together. With the wonderful selection and introduction by Michael Hofmann, they are literary postcards from a lost world, inexorably heading towards a world war.