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. Emo...

When his plane crash-lands in the Mexican desert, Walter Faber experiences the first of several remarkable coincidences that lead him almost unconsciously on a personal journey into his past. Faber is a truly dedicated technologist-engineer: he distrusts emotions and believes only in the calculable. Yet it is by a series of totally incalculable events that he encounters a lost friend, a former lover, and a daughter he has never known, until gradually he is caught in a tragedy of starkly cl...

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 hi...

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 ...

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 the 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 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 hi...

Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: "I'm not Stiller!" He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by "the morbid impulse to convince," but no one bel...

From the acclaimed author of All Quiet on the Western Front comes Three Comrades, a harrowing novel that follows a group of friends as they cope with upheaval in Germany between World Wars I and II.The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship...

This classic Austrian novella paints a deeply moving portrait of a woman whose quest for passion and purpose comes at a steep priceThe less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly.So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C—recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion of a desperate stranger, she disc...

A luxury hotel in 1920s Berlin is a microcosm of modern society in this classic that inspired a hit Broadway musical and the classic film starring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and John Barrymore.“Prefigures Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple characters from different classes.” —Shelf AwarenessThe luxury Grand Hotel is a revolving door for the stray souls of 1920s Berlin. Among the guests ...