Recommendations based on "The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre"

The film director describes his youth in Nazi Poland, his film directing career, the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, his arrest on a morals charge, his new acting career, and his films

NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Strauss's Radetzky March, signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the Trotta family in the years preceding the Austro-Hungarian collapse in 1918. Grandfather, son and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his enoblement; the second for the civil virtues that make him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct which he cannot attain but against which he is too enfeebled to rebel.

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke―then a struggling poet in Germany―went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet. 16 illustrations

This work brings to readers of English a comprehensive and engaging treatment of one of America's greatest, if largely forgotten, film directors. Dumont's celebrated 1993 study, translated from the French by Jonathan Kaplansky, offers complete coverage of Borzage's entire career--the more than 100 films he made and the effect of those films on movie audiences, especially between 1920 and 1940. Lavishly illustrated with 120 photographs, the book also contains a complete filmography, a chronological bibliography, and an index.

The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth—with Kafka, Mann, and Musil—in the twentieth-century literary canon. Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life—his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris. Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”

A descriptive listing of the films produced during this decade is presented together with credit and subject indices