Monique Schwitter Book order

One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art—erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious. When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another. What exactly is love? How does it come and go? She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel. Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother. Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last. But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.

What is it that makes one person a complete stranger, and another a friend, an accomplice, or even a lover? This is the question explored by these brilliant and quirky short stories. A traveler shuts himself up in his hotel room with no one but room service to talk to, a teenager stalks her long-lost father, a journalist interviews a great poet with a dark past, a woman pursues a doomed liaison with an anonymous man she meets once a month at the casino, a bar lady locked in with the regulars at night are just some tales in this collection that explore the mysterious and random side of human relationships. From the winner of the prestigious Robert Walser First Novel Award and Switzerland’s Schiller Foundation Writers Prize, Goldfish Memory is a form-breaking work not to be missed.