Writers' notebooks sometimes prove more revelatory than diaries or intimate journals. At first they might appear to be rag-and-bone shops of ideas, insights, hesitations, doubts, and records of things seen, heard, read, dreamt. But eventually they co...

Rainer Brambach, one of the most widely appreciated Swiss poets in the 1950s and '60s, was notorious for walking to the beat of his own drum, denying convention and standing his ground against popular styles and trends. He grew up in Basel and left s...

"My father bought me from the council for 365 francs", recalls the narrator in Monica Cantieni's novel 'The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons'. She's a young girl, an immigrant to Switzerland whose adoption is yet to be finalized. When she finally moves...