The gripes and jokes of Roth

The poet Michael Hofmann has performed such an invaluable service that it's a shame that the minting of medals has gone out of fashion. Almost single-handedly, he has rescued from oblivion the works of one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century: Joseph Roth.

Before Hofmann began translating his novels into English in the 1980s, practically no one outside the German-speaking world had heard of Roth - and even in that relatively confined space, his reputation as a leading literary figure between the wars had inexplicably fallen on hard times.

Since Hofmann's new translation of The Radetzky March, followed by gems such as The Emperor's Tomb and The String of Pearls, Roth is finally beginning to gain the audience and the serious attention he deserves. Now, with the publication of these shorter pieces, all the fiction he wrote in his brief and unhappy life - he died of drink in 1939, aged 45 - is available in English for the first time.

Some of the stories and fragments in this collection will surprise readers who have come to know Roth the fabulist and black farceur through his novels. A few contain fine descriptive passages, gritty realism and neutral social observation rare in the rest of his work. But Roth was a highly popular, widely syndicated and astonishingly well-paid journalist for most of his working life, and it is easy to see why. He was a brilliant reporter.

Much of the territory, though, will be familiar. Roth's constant theme was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fracture of Europe. There are stories here about caf? society in Vienna and bourgeois provincial towns on the edge of the Empire, petty officials in a bloated bureaucracy and small-time crooks in shtetls.

Sometimes he writes as though overwhelmed by a sense of loss - Roth suffered acutely from the disorder of Middle European Melancholia. Stationmaster Fallmerayer, about a railwayman who falls in love with a Russian countess, is one of the most bitter coup de foudre stories ever written. At other times Roth tells a joke, or makes an ironic observation so well that he can barely suppress a giggle. In The Honors Student, a hilarious sketch about overweening ambition, he describes the eternal petty official from bureaucracies down the ages: "His flatteries had something of the character of an official act ? he was half public official, half private secretary, in on all kinds of secrets, a little bit dignified, a little bit submissive, a little bit proud and a little bit wanting a tip."

Roth's politics have been written off, even by his admirers, as an irrelevance. It's said that, like Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig, he was an elegist of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - which must make him politically incorrect. This misreads him. Roth was never sentimental in his nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire. He described its absurdities with irony and wit, and he wasn't essentially a royalist. What he admired was the Empire's cosmopolitan nature - it kept squabbling ethnic groups in a semblance of peace and harmony for hundreds of years. Forced to leave Germany in 1934 after Hitler came to power, he hated extreme nationalism. He was a pan-European. Intelligent Yugoslavs - even those dreamers who created the European Union - would grasp what he was getting at in The Bust of The Emperor, one of the best stories in this collection. His hero is discussing Darwinian evolution: "In my book it's the monkeys that are descended from the nationalists, because they're a step up from them."