Swiss Literatures
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Lichter in Menlo Park Urweider, Raphael (Lights in Menlo Park)
Raphael Urweider’s volume of poetry «Lights in Menlo Park» captures the world in its material guise. He finds a commanding and mature voice to write about continents, clouds, nature and all ...
Aus dem Leben einer Matratze bester Machart Krohn, Tim (From the Life of a Perfect Mattress)
Immanuel Wassermann is a Jewish dyestuff manufacturer from Berlin. When he meets Gioia, a young, pretty girl from Sicily, in Locarno, they are both lost the moment they set eyes on each other. ...
Panischer Frühling Leutenegger, Gertrud (Panic Spring)
Ejafjallajökull: the name of the Icelandic volcano that erupted in 2010, had the whole of Europe literally holding its breath and presented airlines with a formidable problem. Even London was ...
Der beruhigende Klang von explodierendem Kerosin Helle, Heinz (The Reassuring Sound of Exploding Kerosene)
The pivotal figure in Heinz Helle’s first novel –«The Reassuring Sound of Exploding Kerosene» – is an anonymous ‹ I › – a first-person narrator, who wants to discover, who this ...
Bergsteigen im Flachland Mannhart, Urs (Mountaineering in the Lowlands)
Thomas Steinhövel is a freelance reporter, who travels much of the time. His trips take him to Milan and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan; to northern Norway and southern Spain; to Kosovo, Serbia ...
Nicht schwindelfrei Schubiger, Jürg (No Head for Heights)
What exactly is going on around him, Paul can’t say, he doesn’t know. He has, though, an undeniable suspicion that something isn’t right: «He was ill, so it was said, or, had been. But it ...
Koala Bärfuss, Lukas
Schweizer Buchpreis 2014 The Dramatist and novelist Lukas Bärfuss comes from Thun. At the beginning of the 19th century, the distinguished poet Heinrich von Kleist – who later ...
Béton armé Rahmy, Philippe (Reinforced Concrete)
«Shanghai is not a city. This is not the word that comes to mind. Nothing comes. Then astonishment at the noise. Noise like the ocean or an engine of war. A tumult, an infinity of perspectives, ...
Uno splendido inganno Fazioli, Andrea (A Magnificent Deception)
Guido Moretti is a man of the highest integrity, who has worked all his life as an accountant, first in Italy, then in Switzerland. One day, someone robs the service station where he works. No one ...
L'uomo che vive sui treni Gianinazzi, Andrea (The Man Who Lives on Trains)
Here are eight stories – told as if eight fragments of a single story: the story of a vagrant, who lives on trains and whose own path crosses the paths of many other people. Only the first and ...
Sommer in Brandenburg Faes, Urs (Summer in Brandenburg)
It’s Summer, 1938: Lissy Harb and Ron Berend are spending some time in Brandenburg, working on a Jewish agricultural training project in Ahrensdorf, near Trebbin. Ron is from Hamburg, Lissy from ...
Daskind Mehr, Mariella (Thechild)
Thechild does not have a name nor does it have any rights. It lives with its foster parents. It is regularly punished by its foster father, sexually abused by their lodger, and reprimandes by the ...
Lena Johansen, Hanna
Lena is waiting for her niece Sophie who is about to come and visit at four o’clock. Until then, there is still some time, waiting, a long time: yearning – for her niece and for the past? ...
Der rote Ritter Muschg, Adolf (The Red Knight)
800 years after Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes wrote the story for the first time, «Parzival» continues to describe human maturation in a most exemplary way. An ignorant fool ...
Festland Werner, Markus (Mainland)
Julia wants to leave, it doesn’t matter where she’ll go, she just wants to leave. She just graduated and now faces a big emptyness which her complacent boyfriend is unable to fill. Then her ...
Meine Väter Dean, Martin R. (My Fathers)
The Swiss born Martin R. Dean is the son of two fathers, both from Trinidad. He varies this private fact in his novel by using different narrative forms. His first person narrator finds this ...
Wunderwelt Loetscher, Hugo (Wonderworld)
Hugo Loetscher once called himself a «Sweetwater Portuguese». In Lisbon he discovered the very edge of Europe, from here he set sail for the New World. He documented his encounters in Cearà, ...
Reise an den Rand des Universums Widmer, Urs (Journey to The End of the Universe)
Schweizer Literaturpreise 2014 «No author in his right mind writes an autobiography». Against the fear that this would be the end of one’s material it ...
La Claire Fontaine Bosc, David (The Clear Fountain)
Swiss Literature Prizes 2014 David Bosc’s «La Claire Fontaine» is a novel about a painter, Gustave Courbet. It is also a book about Lake Léman captured ...
Le Milieu de l’horizon Buti, Roland (The Middle of the Horizon)
Swiss Literature Prizes 2014 With a power reminiscent of some of Faulkner’s works, in his novel «Le Milieu de l’horizon» Roland Buti takes us to the ...
J’aime ce qui vacille Pagnard, Rose-Marie (I Like that which Falters)
Swiss literature prizes 2014 Sigui and Ilmar have lost their daughter, a drug addict. Two years later, Sigui is casting around in search of a truth, or an ...
Uno per uno Soldini, Tomaso (One by one)
They grew up in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s, in a country that was flourishing; but even so, the characters in One by One live a life on the edge of society, a life full of unanswered ...
Gloria Kramer, Pascale
When Michel receives a phone call from Gloria, asking him to go and see her, he knows he should say ‘no’: he shouldn’t go. Gloria belongs to his past, he was involved with her years before. ...
Catscha sil Capricornen Cavrein Tuor, Leo (Hunting Ibex in the Cavrein)
«If you want know everything, every last detail, about a valley, everything about a mountain and its slopes, its rocks, its screes, outcrops and peaks, its ravines, chasms and crannies, then you ...
Feuer ist eine seltsame Sache Elsässer, Lisa (Fire is a Strange Thing)
«Fire is a strange thing» - was written on a piece of paper left by a man on a woman’s kitchen table. And because it wasn’t just any woman, but of all people his wife’s friend, the charged ...
Frühling der Barbaren Lüscher, Jonas (The Barbarian’s Spring)
Preising is a Swiss factory owner, in his mid-50s and somewhat lazy. He’s on a business trip, staying in a luxurious oasis hotel in Tunisia, the ‘Thousand and One Nights Resort’, where he ...
Soutines letzte Fahrt Dutli, Ralph (Soutin's Last Journey)
On August 6th, 1943, Chaim Soutine is travelling from Chinon, on the river Loire, to occupied Paris, hidden in a hearse. Soutine, the Jewish-Belarussian painter and contemporary of Chagall, ...
Noch ein Leben für John Potocki Ingold, Felix Philipp (Another Life for John Potocki)
«No matter where he’s coming from, because he has all the necessary papers, Potocki can go as he pleases, without let or hindrance: for example, he can sail into any one of the Maghreb ports ...
Kurz vor der Erlösung Fehr, Michael (On the Verge of Salvation)
«Seventeen Sentences» (Siebzehn Sätze) is the sub-title to Michael Fehr’s first book, and in fact this unusual piece of writing does only contain seventeen sentences, long sentences, which ...
Les Mensch Couchepin, Nicolas (The Mensch Family)
The Mensches are a completely ordinary family. They live in an ordinary part of town, worry about the usual things and hope for what everyone hopes for. Theo, the paterfamilias, is worried about ...
