Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Galicia, an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the First World War, he abandoned his studies in Vienna to serve in the Austrian Army. He wrote thirteen novels and numerous short stories and essays. Published in 1930, Job became his first worldwide success, followed by his magnum opus, The Radetzky March, in 1932. When Hitler rose to power, Roth went into exile in Paris, where he died in 1939. Ross Benjamin is a writer and translator living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion, Kevin Vennemann's Close to Jedenew and Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog. He was a 2003-2004 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and won the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov.