Max Frisch Book order

A playfully postmodern novel exploring questions of identify from a major Swiss writer. A man walks out of a bar and is later found dead at the wheel of his car. On the basis of a few overheard remarks and his own observations, the narrator of this novel imagines the story of this stranger, or rather two alternative stories based on two identities the narrator has invented for him, one under the name of Enderlin, the other under the name Gantenbein.

The screenplay "Zurich Transit" was developed from an episode in the novel Gantenbein, published in 1964: 'A story for Camilla: of a man who decides several times to change his life but, of course, never succeeds ...' Yet one day he, Theo Ehrismann, returns from a trip abroad and reads in the paper his own obituary. He arrives just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, especially not to his wife: 'How does one say that he is alive?' Max Frisch counters the traditional dramaturgy based on causality with a dramaturgy of coincidence. 'Life,' Max Frisch said in 1965, '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.'

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.

The daily journal of a giant of German literature, touching subjects ranging from the everyday life to the political and social conditions in East Germany as viewed from West Berlin. 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 Günter 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.

»Halten Sie sich für einen guten Freund? Sind Sie sich selber ein Freund?« Zwischen diesen beiden Fragestellungen liegen 23 Fragen zum Thema Freundschaft. Max Frischs berühmte Fragebogen entstammen dem Tagebuch 1966-1971 , und jeder dieser zehn Fragebogen kreist ein Thema ein: Es geht um Ehe, Frauen, Humor, Geld, Freundschaft, Vatersein, Heimat, Eigentum und nichts weniger als die Erhaltung des Menschengeschlechts. Die Antworten bleiben der Fantasie der Leser überlassen – ein unwiderstehlicher Lesegenuss.

Max Frisch's candid story of his affair with a young woman illuminates a lifetime of relationships. Casting himself as both subject and observer, Frisch reflects on his marriages, children, friendships, and careers; a holiday weekend in Long Island is a trigger to recount and question events and aspects of his own life, along with creeping fears of mortality. He paints a bittersweet portrait that is sometimes painful and sometimes humorous, but always affecting. Emotionally raw and formally innovative, Frisch’s novel collapses the distinction between art and life, but leaves the reader with a richer understanding of both.

'New York . . . I HATE IT. I LOVE IT. I DON'T KNOW' This could serve as a motto to large parts of Drafts for a Third Sketchbook, much of which focuses on America, where Frisch had an apartment, as well as his house in rural Switzerland. He wrote three Sketchbooks, of which the third was left unpublished at his death in 1991, that record his reactions to events of the time and people he encountered in his daily life. Despite the German title Tagebuch, they are not diaries in the formal sense, though they do progress chronologically but mostly without dates and only contain the pieces Frisch felt were significant. These 'sketches', ranging from a couple of sentences to several pages, are not casual jottings but carefully crafted pieces. Central to them is his reaction to the America of the Reagan years and the threat of nuclear war but another important theme is his own sense of growing old and the prospect of dying; this is particularly movingly portrayed in the decline and death from cancer of his close friend, Peter Noll. Max Frisch (1911-91) was one of the giants of twentieth-century literature, achieving fame as a novelist, playwright, diarist and essayist. He received the Georg Büchner prize in 1958 and the Neustadt Literature prize in 1986. For many years a lecturer in German with a special interest in Austrian literature, Mike Mitchell has worked as a literary translator since 1995. Publisher's note.