Unavailable for over seventy years and long out of print in English, The Antichrist is the most mysterious, if not bizarre, of Roth's works, one that has long baffled even some of his many devotees. A dizzying hybrid of novel, essay, and polemic, it was written while Roth was in exile from Germany and his native Austria following the rise of Nazism, composed in cafes across free Europe after all his works in German went up in flames.