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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,â€? 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 Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952‿2005, Jacottet offers here passages about his family, the death of his father-in-law and of his mother, his encounters with other major poets‿such as René Char, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, and his friends Yves Bonnefoy and André du Bouchet‿and his trips abroad, as well as, characteristically, his walks in the countryside around the village of Grignan, in the south of France, where he has lived since 1953. For a poet who has been notoriously discreet about his life, this book offers unexpected glimpses of the private man. Above all, the entries in this notebook show how one of the greatest European poets grapples with the discouraging elements of existence, counterbalancing them by recording fleeting perceptions in which “something else,â€? almost like a threshold, seems present. Â

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 Öderland. 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.

The eponymous Old Testament hero Noah 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 Mesopotamia had never had it so good.

New York... I HATE IT... I LOVE IT... I DON'T KNOW...". These are the reflections of Max Frisch, writing from his apartment in the Big Apple near the end of the twentieth century. He kept a series of sketchbooks to record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. This title presents these sketches.

T, an acclaimed but aging actor, and Efina, a passionate theatergoer, are engaged in an obsessive love affair that careens from attraction to repulsion. 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.

Rainer Brambach, one of the most widely appreciated Swiss poets in the 1950s and '60s, was notorious for walking to the beat of his own drum, defying convention, and standing his ground against popular styles and trends. This collection of poems, represents a major English translation of this significant European poet.

A novel, in which 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.

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.

Of the key figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets--Anne Perrier, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Andre du Bouchet, Jacques Reda, and Pierre-Albert Jourdan--who have poetically scrutinized what might be called "the nature of Nature," Pierre Chappuis (b. 1930) has remained unjustly absent in English except for scattered translations in print magazines, online reviews, and two anthologies. This book rights this situation by making available a generous representative selection of his prolific output, ranging from his pioneering collections of short prose, Blind Distance (1974), and of short verse, Full Margins (1997), through his most recent book of poetry, Cuts (2014). Long celebrated in his native Switzerland, Chappuis delves into questions related to landscape, phenomenology, the essence of life, and the role of the perceiver. He writes with contagious passion, both in his poetic prose (with its sinuous style and parenthetical inserts) and in his--in contrast--succinct, skeletal, haiku-like verse whose titles, like invigorating afterthoughts, are often placed at the end. Two styles fascinate in Chappuis' oeuvre: his stream-like prose with its eddies and rapids and his poetry that captures "bits of wind."

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. The Spirits of the Earth is the first English translation of Colomb's work and its arrival will introduce new readers to an iconic novel.The Spirits of the Earth is at heart a family drama, set at the Fraidaigue château, along the shores of Lake Geneva, and in the Maison d'en Haut country mansion, located in the hills above the lake. In these luxe locales, readers encounter upper-class characters with faltering incomes, parvenues, and even ghosts. Throughout, Colomb builds a psychologically penetrating and bold story in which the living and the dead intermingle and in which time itself is a mystery.

Gustave Roud, perhaps the most beloved poet of Swiss Romandy, is widely considered the founder of modern francophone Swiss literature, along with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Roud lived at his grandfather's farm in Carrouge, Canton Vaud, for his entire life. In Air of Solitude, the first section of this two-part book, he stalks the structures and fields of his youth, composing memories out of his landscape. The narrator appears homegrown, expressing nostalgia for what is already in front of him. Yet, like an outsider, he remains distinctly elsewhere, unable to participate in the workday rituals of the men around him--a stalking shadow of unfulfilled yearning for affection and belonging. Air of Solitude explores the rural bodies and lives of the Vaudois, returning again and again to the desired male laborer Aimé. Between each section of Air of Solitude, Roud inserts short vignettes that provide fleeting and lyrical images that resemble allusions to half-forgotten memories. However, Roud leaves the relationship between the titled sections and the interludes ambiguous. As the book concludes with Requiem, the remnants of narrative shatter, leaving behind only the spectral tatters of memory as Roud confronts the enigma of loss in peerless, jewel-studded elegiac prose. With these two tales, Roud revives the pastoral tradition and injects it with distinctly modernist anxiety and disillusionment.