Böcker i Swiss Literature-serien

Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zundel: a philosopher, a wanna-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent . . . At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Zundel seems on the verge of falling to bits, as do his words, thoughts, wife, and world-will there be anything left, and anyone to hold the pieces? Zundel's Exit is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it's coming or going.

A cornerstone of Swiss modernism, at last available in English translation from one of the great German translators of our time.

In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protege to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability to remember. The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information-and its loss-can be a matter of life and death.

When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "e;a city whose very name sounded exotic."e; Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in "e;the Ring"e; to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living-safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.

Volatile Texts is Zsuzsanna Gahse's ironic and prescient meditation on a Europe that is disintegrating, yet language itself is the true subject of these prose miniatures, which are volatile because they expose language as an arbitrary construct made of interchangeable parts; however, this is also what makes the book such an exciting read.