As the current global recession stubbornly persists and financial experts around the world struggle to prevent further financial collapse, everyone has a theory about how to save the economy. But perhaps no idea that has been proffered is as radical or as unique as what Hugo Loetscher imagines in his novel "Noah." In this book, first published in German in 1967, the eponymous Old Testament hero fuels his local economy with a prescient plan to build the Ark.Though no one around him seriously believes in the coming flood, everyone is more than willing to do business with him: The people of...

Friedrich Durrenmatt was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, a talent on par with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. A prolific writer of letters, poems, novels, and shorter fictions, his essays on literary forms as well as those on philosophy and politics provide a window onto his world and his work, demonstrating both his critical acumen and the breadth of his talents as a stylist.
Gathered from throughout his long career, the writings featured in Durrenmatt s "Selected Essays" are by turns playful and polemical, poetic...

New York . . . I HATE IT. . . I LOVE IT. . . I DON T KNOW. . . These are the reflections of Max Frisch (1911 91) writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1946 and continuing until his death at the age of eighty, the man whom many see as Switzerland s greatest writer kept a series of sketchbooks to record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. Neither a commonplace book nor a diary, these volumes contain the seeds for many of Frisch s most famous works including "Homo Faber," "I m Not Stiller," and...

The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio s"Privy Portrait"has fallen on hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he s blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. His neighbors, the Shritzkys, are vulgar, narrow-minded, and racist. And because he has no space for his encyclopedia in his cramped room, he stores it in the communal bathroom, and this becomes a major point of contention with his neighbors. The bathroom is also the only place he can find refuge from the...

T., an acclaimed but ageing actor, and Efina, a passionate theatergoer, are engaged in an obsessive love affair that careens from attraction to repulsion. They compulsively write lettersoften to express their intense dislike of one anotherwhich are sent or unsent, answered or unanswered. They meet, they break up, they marry, and they get divorced. They neither can live with nor without one another, and this impossible state of affairs lasts all their lives. In-between, there are other men and many other women, but throughout, the magic of the theater and the art of make-believe endure....

In the wildly entertaining novel"The Blue Soda Siphon," the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing. Then, in another switch, the young boy that he was back then turns up in the present of the early 1990s, during the Gulf War, where he meets himself as an older man, and meets his adult self s young daughter. These head-scratching, hilarious time shifts happen when both the adult narrator and his childhood self go to the cinema and see films, the...

The day is Friday, May 22, 2032. On this day, the day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man is sitting in a beautiful garden. It is a paradise where he often played during his childhood, and it is here that he is recording the story of his adventures with Mr. Adamson. In the course of this compelling novel from Swiss author Urs Widmer, this man narrates his unusual story to his granddaughter, Anni. While he recounts his life, he is also waitingwaiting for the arrival of this very Mr. Adamson, whom he has not seen since the age of eight. Even then it was a mysterious encountera glimpse into...

Kuno, a male nurse in a Swiss retirement home, has a new inmate: his father. In the confines of their new home, the pair does something surprising they finally begin to talk. Kuno had always regarded his father as a boring man without a history or a destiny, until they are thrust together and he learns that his father risked his life in the war. Stunned, Kuno embarks on a journey into his own psyche, taking him to the depths of the Congo. Here, longings awaken and dreams come true rays of light in the darkness, meetings with kings, seductive women, and the songs of the jungle. This alluring...