A volume that brings together two of Roth's short novels. The Spider's Web, from the early 1920s, follows an ambitious young ex-soldier in Germany who joins a shadowy nationalist circle and rises through intrigue, an unsettling prediction of the political currents that were to come. Zipper and His Father is a later and gentler story of a Viennese father and his son, a struggling actor, and of poverty, hope and the bonds of family in the unsettled years between the wars.