Max Frisch

When this novel begins, the protagonist has just turned thirty, is engaged to be married, and is about to start work as a teacher. Frightened by the idea of settling down, he journeys to the Alps in a do-or-die effort to climb the unclimbed North Ridge, and by doing so, prove he is not ordinary. However, he returns not in...

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch’s innovative notebooks. Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according...

A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch’s diaries. By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and...

Zurich Transit, a screenplay by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, was developed from an episode in his 1964 novel Gantenbein, or A Wilderness of Mirrors. At the centre of both works is Theo Ehrismann, a man who cannot seem to change his life no matter how many times he resolves to do so. Chance comes to Theo one day...