Series: The Swiss List

T., an acclaimed but ageing actor, and Efina, a passionate theatre-goer, are engaged in an obsessive love affair that careens from attraction to repulsion. They compulsively write letters—often to express their intense dislike of one another—which are sent or unsent, answered or unanswered. They meet, they break up, they marry, and they get divorced. They neither can live with nor...

Writers’ notebooks sometimes prove more revelatory than diaries or intimate journals. At first, they might appear to be rag-and-bone shops of ideas, insights, hesitations, doubts, and records of things seen, heard, read, dreamt. But eventually, they coalesce into a labyrinthine map of the creative process. Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet has faithfully kept notebooks for many decades, and the selections that...

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...

Philippe Jaccottet’s newest work follows in some ways the approach of Seedtime, his recent two-volume collection of notebooks. Similarly comprising on-the-spot jottings, philosophical reflections, literary commentary, dream narratives and sundry “notes,” this book nonetheless differs from the preceding volumes in that the Swiss poet includes more personal material than ever before. Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952–2005, Jaccottet...

Now in paperback, a haunting story of trauma, memory, and healing in post-Cold War Romania. Victoria has just recently moved from Zurich back to her hometown of Bucharest when the bank where she works is robbed. Put on leave so that she can process the trauma of the robbery, Victoria strolls around town. Each street triggers sudden visions as memories...