"Joseph Roth, the greatest newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for France in 1925 and produced, until his death in 1939, some of the finest writing of his career. Collected here for the first time, Roth's essays form an unrivaled portrait of France in the late 1920s and 1930s - a society at a twentieth-century crossing point - resolute in its desire to preserve a past that was already crumbling while at the same time drawn to the seductive rhythms of urban life. Roth describes a world where the center could not hold - a portrait of a country unknowingly barreling toward social collapse and political anarchy."--BOOK JACKET.