The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

Reissue of this Methuen classic to tie in with a major new productionThe republic of Andorra is invaded by totalitarian forces. The populace capitulates to the anti-Semitism of the aggressor and betrays Andri, the foundling son of the local schoolmaster. But Andri it seems, is not a Jew at all.Andorra explores the mechanism of racism with the story of a non-Jew brought up as a Jew, who falls victim to anti-Semitic hostility.

Three contentious and enduring plays about the clash of the individual and society Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It "is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique" (Edna O'Brien); Andorra is based on the author's own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a writer grappling with his own mortality. The flexible and contemporary translations by Michael Bullock (The Fire Raisers, Andorra) and Geoffrey Skelton (Triptych) are here complemented by an introduction by Peter Loeffler.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The classic German novel with a narrator as "treacherous, evasive and compelling as an Edgar Allan Poe murderer or a Raymond Chandler detective" (The New York Times).The unabridged version of a haunting story of a man in prison. His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he''s not Stiller. Could he possibly be right—or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?"The novel intertwines a classic tale of mistaken identity with high comedy and postwar seriousness. Is Stiller''s testimony of his life the ''unvarnished truth'' as he claims? Or is his version a last-ditch effort in deception—a denial of an identity he despises? We don''t know, and therein lies the beauty of experiencing I''m Not Stiller. For anyone who likes a narrator served unreliably, you must read this . . . we find ourselves actively piecing together the mystery of a man''s identity with much more delight and humor than any of Frisch''s postwar compatriots like Sartre or Camus." —Alex Gilvarry, NPR, All Things Considered podcast"Readers cannot but feel the force of what remains one of the most important novels of the post-war years." —Times Literary Supplement"A single consciousness contains multitudes: in fathoming it, Frisch evokes the complex reality of a dangerous and enthralling world." —New Statesman"A strange, speculative search for an identity and it progresses—on a parallel—at two levels . . . For the thoughtful reader, an enigma which has its subtler, deeper implications." —Kirkus Reviews

Texts include selections from "Sketchbook 1946-1949," "I'm Not Stiller," "Homo Faber: A Report," "Gantenbein," "Sketchbook 1966-1971," "Wilhelm Tell: A School Text," "Military Service Record," "Montauk," and "Man in the Holocene." The plays includes selections from "Now They are Singing Again," "Don Juan," "Andorra," "The Fire Raisers," "Biography: A Game," and "Tryptich: Three Scenic Panels." The essays and speeches include "Emigrants," "Foreignization I," "Switzerland as Heimat," and "Questionaire 1987."

Max Frisch (1911 91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a "scribbling book," but rather a book "fully composed." The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch's literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the "private things" he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch's journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946 49 and 1966 71. Observations about the writer's everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Gunter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others.Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin.

This novel by esteemed Swiss writer Max Frisch is an exploration of the question: “Why don’t we live when we know we’re here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?!” This outcry against the emptiness of ordinary everyday life uttered by the hero of Frisch’s book is countered by “an answer from the silence” he meets when face-to-face with death.When An Answer from the Silence begins, the protagonist has just turned thirty and is engaged to be married and 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. But having reached the top he returns not in triumph, but in frostbitten shock, having come dangerously close to death.This highly personal early novel reflects a crisis in Frisch’s own life, and perhaps because of this intimate connection, he refused to allow it to be included in his Collected Works in the 1970s. Now available in English, this distinctive book will thrill fans of Frisch’s other works.

This 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 center 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 upon returning from a trip abroad—he arrives home to read his own obituary in the paper. He shows up just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, and especially not to his wife. “How does one say that he is alive,” wonders Theo.Life, as Frisch said, “is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future.” Zurich Transit presents Frisch at the height of his dramatic powers and exemplifies his ardent believe in a dramaturgy of coincidence rather than causality.

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 to the New York Times, "the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors." His diaries, said the Times, "read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries." Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946-1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count OEderland. Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook-whether it's a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples-his keen dramatist's eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch's observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It’s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It’s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people’s homes only to burn them all down. It’s a plague. And we don’t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can’t be arsonists. They’re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It''s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It''s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people''s homes only to burn them all down. It''s a plague. And we don''t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can''t be arsonists. They''re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It''s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It''s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people''s homes only to burn them all down. It''s a plague. And we don''t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can''t be arsonists. They''re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

Fires are becoming something of a problem. But Biedermann has it all under control. He's a respected member of the community with a loving wife and a flourishing business, so surely nothing can get to him. The great philanthropist is happy to meet his civic duty by giving shelter to two new guests but when they start filling his attic with petrol drums, will he help them light the fuse? Max Frisch's parable about appeasement is given its first major UK revival since its Royal Court premiere in 1961, which was directed by Lindsay Anderson. The play is published as a programme text for the production that runs from 1 November - 15 December on the main stage at the Royal Court.

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

The novel tells the story of a middle-class UNESCO engineer called Walter Faber, who believes in rational, calculated world. Strange events undermine his security - an emergency landing in a Mexican desert against all odds, his friend Joachim hangs himself in the Mexican jungle, and he falls in love with a woman who dies of a concussion, he has an incestuous affair. Finally Faber becomes ill with stomach cancer, but it is too late for him to change his life.

Reissue of this Methuen classic to tie in with a major new productionThe republic of Andorra is invaded by totalitarian forces. The populace capitulates to the anti-Semitism of the aggressor and betrays Andri, the foundling son of the local schoolmaster. But Andri it seems, is not a Jew at all.Andorra explores the mechanism of racism with the story of a non-Jew brought up as a Jew, who falls victim to anti-Semitic hostility.

Three contentious and enduring plays about the clash of the individual and society Fire Raisers (1958) tells the tale of a respectable bourgeois whose house is one day visited by three strangers. It "is successful on every level; the story is as gripping as an adventure story; each line is fraught with several meanings: as an allegory it is unique" (Edna O'Brien); Andorra is based on the author's own experience of anti-semitism in Switzerland and is about Andri, a young man who is believed to be a Jew and who is persecuted by his community as a result; Triptych is a portrait of a writer grappling with his own mortality. The flexible and contemporary translations by Michael Bullock (The Fire Raisers, Andorra) and Geoffrey Skelton (Triptych) are here complemented by an introduction by Peter Loeffler.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The classic German novel with a narrator as "treacherous, evasive and compelling as an Edgar Allan Poe murderer or a Raymond Chandler detective" (The New York Times).The unabridged version of a haunting story of a man in prison. His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he''s not Stiller. Could he possibly be right—or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?"The novel intertwines a classic tale of mistaken identity with high comedy and postwar seriousness. Is Stiller''s testimony of his life the ''unvarnished truth'' as he claims? Or is his version a last-ditch effort in deception—a denial of an identity he despises? We don''t know, and therein lies the beauty of experiencing I''m Not Stiller. For anyone who likes a narrator served unreliably, you must read this . . . we find ourselves actively piecing together the mystery of a man''s identity with much more delight and humor than any of Frisch''s postwar compatriots like Sartre or Camus." —Alex Gilvarry, NPR, All Things Considered podcast"Readers cannot but feel the force of what remains one of the most important novels of the post-war years." —Times Literary Supplement"A single consciousness contains multitudes: in fathoming it, Frisch evokes the complex reality of a dangerous and enthralling world." —New Statesman"A strange, speculative search for an identity and it progresses—on a parallel—at two levels . . . For the thoughtful reader, an enigma which has its subtler, deeper implications." —Kirkus Reviews

Texts include selections from "Sketchbook 1946-1949," "I'm Not Stiller," "Homo Faber: A Report," "Gantenbein," "Sketchbook 1966-1971," "Wilhelm Tell: A School Text," "Military Service Record," "Montauk," and "Man in the Holocene." The plays includes selections from "Now They are Singing Again," "Don Juan," "Andorra," "The Fire Raisers," "Biography: A Game," and "Tryptich: Three Scenic Panels." The essays and speeches include "Emigrants," "Foreignization I," "Switzerland as Heimat," and "Questionaire 1987."

Max Frisch (1911 91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a "scribbling book," but rather a book "fully composed." The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch's literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the "private things" he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch's journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946 49 and 1966 71. Observations about the writer's everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Gunter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others.Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin.

This novel by esteemed Swiss writer Max Frisch is an exploration of the question: “Why don’t we live when we know we’re here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?!” This outcry against the emptiness of ordinary everyday life uttered by the hero of Frisch’s book is countered by “an answer from the silence” he meets when face-to-face with death.When An Answer from the Silence begins, the protagonist has just turned thirty and is engaged to be married and 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. But having reached the top he returns not in triumph, but in frostbitten shock, having come dangerously close to death.This highly personal early novel reflects a crisis in Frisch’s own life, and perhaps because of this intimate connection, he refused to allow it to be included in his Collected Works in the 1970s. Now available in English, this distinctive book will thrill fans of Frisch’s other works.

This 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 center 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 upon returning from a trip abroad—he arrives home to read his own obituary in the paper. He shows up just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, and especially not to his wife. “How does one say that he is alive,” wonders Theo.Life, as Frisch said, “is the sum of events that happen by chance, and it always could as well have turned out differently; there is not a single action or omission that does not allow for variables in the future.” Zurich Transit presents Frisch at the height of his dramatic powers and exemplifies his ardent believe in a dramaturgy of coincidence rather than causality.

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 to the New York Times, "the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors." His diaries, said the Times, "read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries." Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946-1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count OEderland. Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook-whether it's a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples-his keen dramatist's eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch's observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It’s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It’s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people’s homes only to burn them all down. It’s a plague. And we don’t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can’t be arsonists. They’re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It''s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It''s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people''s homes only to burn them all down. It''s a plague. And we don''t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can''t be arsonists. They''re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

But the best disguise, I find, is always the absolute bollock naked truth. It''s really strange. Nobody believes it.This is an amoral morality play. It''s also got songs in it.Fires keep starting. All across the city, arsonists worm their way into respectable people''s homes only to burn them all down. It''s a plague. And we don''t know why.But Trueman is no fool. He can spot an arsonist from a mile away. These two strangers with troubled pasts who turn up on his doorstep asking for a spare room can''t be arsonists. They''re too polite. Like him. Everybody is far too respectable to act on their suspicions. Even when they fill his attic with barrels of petrol and ask him to help measure the fuse.In a new version by Simon Stephens, with songs by Chris Thorpe, Trueman and the Arsonists explores how moral lethargy can invite evil in – even encouraging you to give it a warm blanket and a nice dinner.This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Roundhouse in London, in October 2023.

Fires are becoming something of a problem. But Biedermann has it all under control. He's a respected member of the community with a loving wife and a flourishing business, so surely nothing can get to him. The great philanthropist is happy to meet his civic duty by giving shelter to two new guests but when they start filling his attic with petrol drums, will he help them light the fuse? Max Frisch's parable about appeasement is given its first major UK revival since its Royal Court premiere in 1961, which was directed by Lindsay Anderson. The play is published as a programme text for the production that runs from 1 November - 15 December on the main stage at the Royal Court.