Elvio Fachinelli (1928–1989) was a leading Italian psychoanalyst whose clinical, theoretical, and activist work resonated well beyond his discipline. In The Still Arrow, Fachinelli launches an interdisciplinary investigation ranging from anthropology to politics, and from the history of religions to the critique of ideology. 

Originally published in 1979, this book displays Fachinelli’s eclectic methodology. The Still Arrow goes against Freud’s attempt in Totem and Taboo to equate individual psycho-libidinal predicaments with those of whole societies. Yet, it argues that the difference between the two always remains one of degree, not of principle. The vexing problem of their relation is approached through an interrogation of time. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, individual obsessional neurosis is firmly connected to a repudiation of death. But, Fachinelli argues, comparable temporal strategies are also present at the group level, in disparate social and historical contexts, for instance, in the archaic transformation of the dead into ancestors and in what he names 'the fascist phenomenon'.

From this perspective, history is not just the sum of all possible histories but also of impossible ones. Fachinelli delineates an innovative knowledge of time which brings together apparently distant events into a characteristic series. This first English translation of a book by Fachinelli, The Still Arrow introduces a major critical European voice to the larger readership.

A playfully postmodern novel exploring questions of identity 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.
 

A renowned novel of self-deceit and self-acceptance.

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, and 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 believes him.

This is a harrowing account—part Kafka, part Camus—of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as one of the major post-war works of fiction and a masterpiece of German literature.
 

This screenplay by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch was developed from an episode in his 1964 novel Gantenbein, or A Wilderness of Mirrors. At the center of both works is Theo Ehrismann, a man who cannot seem to change his life no matter how many times he resolves to do so. Chance comes to Theo one day upon returning from a trip abroad—he arrives home to read his own obituary in the paper. He shows up just on time for his own funeral and observes the attending mourners, and yet he is not able to reveal himself to them, and especially not to his wife. “How does one say that he is alive,” wonders Theo.

Life, as Frisch said, “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.” Zurich Transit presents Frisch at the height of his dramatic powers and exemplifies his ardent believe in a dramaturgy of coincidence rather than causality.

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.

A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch’s diaries.

By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and political insight. He considers Cold War tensions as well as the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States. Now middle-aged himself, he looks squarely at men’s evolving attitude to life, love, sex, women, and status. And for all the idyllic descriptions of his new home in Berzona, Frisch becomes increasingly critical of his native Switzerland, in particular the crackdowns on left-wingers and protestors, and receives abuse for his stance. Based on the second German edition that reinstated material that had been removed from the original 1972 version, this fresh and definitive translation brings an important mid-twentieth-century European classic back to life.
 

Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident. 

Franz Fühmann’s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fühmann plumbs the ancient tales’ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeus” probes the divine couple’s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fühmann’s unflinching account of Marsyas’ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fühmann’s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee’s exquisite collages.