Donna Leon has led an adventurous life, and with her tell-tale knack for observation, she turns her experiences in America, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Italy (of course) and Switzerland into a captivating read. She takes us on a journey around the world, from growing up on a farm, to curfew pajama parties in Iran, financial straits, and a Fiat 600. And we join Donna as she arrives in Italy as a chaperone, as she hunts for the perfect cappuccino, and as she encounters small marvels in the mountains.

»There is no worse crime than not having loved.«
Donna Leon

Magnificent and infuriating, loving and stifling, self-sacrificing yet interfering – Michel Bergmann loves his mother Charlotte, and sometimes he can’t stand her. In this unvarnished book, he tells the story of a strong, obstinate woman who was driven out of Germany, lost nearly her entire family, and was ultimately happily reunited with her future husband, yet too often had to face her troubles alone.

Dr. Isidor Geller has made it: he is a highly respected business man, an advisor to the Austrian government, a multi-millionaire, an opera lover, art collector and, after two failed marriages, is in a relationship with a beautiful singer. He has come a long way: from a shtetl in the furthest, most impoverished recesses of Galicia to the most elite circles of Viennese society. 
No one can touch him now, Isidor is sure of that – and certainly not those vulgar National Socialists.
But in 1938, everything changes from one day to the next.

»In the hands of great authors, characters are like real people, merely realer«, Donna Leon once said. Perhaps this is why her life is so rich in characters and people accompanying her, both real and fictional.

Backstage presents a colorful troupe: the rock genius Frank Zappa, Veniceʼs most famous diamond dealer, a courageous sex worker and womenʼs rights activist, a clever composer, tragic heroes and admired colleagues. In the hands of Donna Leon, these encounters turn into sparkling jewels. A treasure trove of delightful discoveries.

Who was Jörg Fauser? What were his influences, his annoyances, what did he dream of and what enraged him? Matthias Penzel and Ambros Waibel let nothing deter them from uncovering the real Jörg Fauser, the rebel and junkie, the son and man. The only biography of the author of unparalleled novels, invaluable reportage, tender poetry and rebellious prose. This new edition expanded with fresh insights and stripped of misinformation is both an enthralling read and important witness to its time.

When Picasso meets hairdresser Eugenio Arias in 1947, they develop a deep relationship.
It is principally their communist conviction that unites the two Spaniards in exile in the South of France, but they also share a great love of bullfighting and a mischievous sense of humour. Picasso’s Hairdresser not only depicts the intense friendship between these two extraordinary men but also offers a fresh look on the world-famous painter as a generous and loyal companion.

Another genre in which Fauser revolutionized everything that went before.

With an afterword by German writer and DJ Franz Dobler.

»I always saw Brando as a rebel – a naive way of looking at it, for sure; what is a rebel anyway? In a world crawling with revolutionaries, the rebel is a man of the past, a conservative. That may be. For so many people of today, the earth seems like a thing of the past, and like Brando, when in doubt I’ll stick with the earth.«

Fauser and Brando – two ruptured souls united by more than just their ability to getting back up when knocked down.

»This is a book about the shadow between idea and reality.«
Jörg Fauser

A book about a man who will not let anyone keep him down: neither as a German Jew in Europe nor as a homosexual in America.

Two generations separate them, but a friendship unites them: Friedrich Dönhoff (45) and Gerald B. Rosenstein, known as Jerry (86). In summer 2013 they set off on a road trip from Amsterdam to Bensheim, following the path of Jerry’s childhood and youth. A few weeks later they meet up again in San Francisco, where Jerry has lived since 1949.

Because Jerry wants to tell his story. After spending his whole life dodging questions about his past, he now wants to tell the account of what he survived as a Jew in Germany, Holland and Auschwitz – how he coped as a homosexual in the USA and how he found his inner freedom.

In Friedrich Dönhoff he has an attentive listener, one who writes his story without any trace of pathos, but with a great deal of sensitivity.

With a picture section.

English translation available.

»First we dream of the future, then we live it, and in the end, once this lived future is in the past, we recount it to ourselves.«

This autobiography is special: it stops where others usually begin. Urs Widmer's years as a child, as a young man, as a student, as an editor. His family home, friends, his first loves, his wife May. Family history and family myths. School, teachers. Holidays, travel. Basel, Montpellier, Greece, Paris. The banal and the dramatic at a time when history was being written: World War II, the Cold War, the sixties. And, again and again, his parents, the ever-present shadows in his work. Even though these memories often deal with the tragic, their vitality and vividness are unsurpassable.

The first major biography of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The making of a star: from Dürrenmatt's origins as a protestant minister's son in rural Switzerland to his international breakthrough with the comedy ›The Visit‹ and the crime novel ›The Pledge‹ in 1956/58. Peter Rüedi's biography of Dürrenmatt's formative years is based on numerous long interviews with Dürrenmatt himself, with his family, friends and colleagues and also on a comprehensive evaluation of Dürrenmatt's abundant literary legacy. It shows us a Dürrenmatt who scarcely resembled his cliché image as a genius to whom success came easily, but who was also a dogged and often desperate wielder of plays and stories having to overcome many crises and failures.

This unusual Swiss artist’s biography is marking the 100th anniversary of Rainer Brambach’s birth. It is not only knowledgably researched but also entertainingly presented and featuring a picture section. At his death in 1983, the poet Rainer Brambach left behind some 140 poems and two dozen short stories – not a large body of work, but an outstanding, very distinct and refreshingly unacademic one. Deported from Switzerland, deserted from the Reich Labour Service and eventually arrested in Switzerland, the former painter, decorator and later gardener was an exceptional phenomenon in the country’s post-war literary scene. He reached his creative apex in the 1950s and 60s, when his poems appeared regularly in the prestigious literary journal Akzente – alongside the work of Enzensberger, Bachmann, Celan, Canetti and other great names of the era. Brambach was also a very close friend to his mentor, the poet Gunter Eich, his wife Ilse Aichinger and the writer and publisher Hans Bender. Franziska Schurch and Isabel Koellreuter have sifted through memories of colleagues and fellow travellers, archives and Rainer Brambach’s literary output. The result is a multi-layered and fascinating biography of an eloquent Swiss poet’s unusual life.

When Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a child, his parents told him the Greek myths and the stories of the Old Testament. These became the essentials of his future artistic material. A student of literature and philosophy in Switzerland spared by the cruelties of World War II, Dürrenmatt imagined the apocalypse in expressionistic paintings and in a first play, which scandalized the Swiss and made Dürrenmatt into a household name. In 1952 he moved with his wife and children to Neuchâtel. It was here, in peace and solitude, that he wrote his internationally acclaimed plays (›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹) and his bestselling crime novels (›The Judge and his Hangman‹, ›The Pledge‹). His late works, considered by many as his crowning achievement, are yet to be discovered by a large audience. Hundreds of unpublished photographs from the writer's private archives are juxtaposed and ›commented‹ by excerpts from Dürrenmatt's autobiographical works and interviews. A fantastic and vivid life in pictures.

Balzac (born 1799 in Tours, died 1850 in Paris) was an incorrigible optimist. But his hope of marrying into money was repeatedly shattered, until he was finally able to marry the Polish Countess Eveline Hanska shortly before his death. Balzac was renowned, and notorious, for his »on credit« lifestyle: mahogany furniture, oriental carpets, rare walking sticks, lemon kid gloves and a back exit to escape from his creditors. Legendary too was his passion for his work – garbed in a monk's habit and kept awake by black coffee, he created the most immense fictional work of all time, ›La Comédie Humaine‹, an entire universe of 1300 characters and their stories. Johannes Willms reveals Balzac's life before the reader's astonished eyes. He bases his biography on the most personal of documents, Balzac's letters, but differentiates between the shimmering veneer (that Balzac cultivated and lived) and the often more dramatic reality.

Tomi Ungerer is nine years old in 1940 when German troops march into Alsace. German becomes the official language, French is banned under threat of severe punishment, and Jean-Thomas, who everyone calls Tomi, becomes Hans. Tomi Ungerer shares his experience of everyday life under Nazi occupation, of the war, of the libération — and of the utterly normal pranks, joy and experiences of a young boy growing up. Enriched with countless childhood drawings and Tomi Ungererʼs boundless humour, this is an incredibly spirited memoir.

Auschwitz, 1941. After one prisoner has managed to escape, ten randomly chosen inmates are sentenced to death by starvation in the ›Hungerbunker‹. A man then steps forward and asks the camp commandant to exchange him for one of the doomed inmates. Who is this man? And what induces him to give his life for a man he doesn't even know? This man is Polish Franciscan monk Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941). With his life marred by tuberculosis from young adulthood, he established, against many odds, a Catholic magazine with a circulation of millions of copies and founded Europe's largest monastery, Niepokalanów. There he gave refuge to Jews and other victims of persecution under the Nazi occupation and as a result ended up in the dungeons of the Gestapo and the camp hell of Auschwitz. In his novel ›The Hour of the Pelican‹, Walter Heinrich traces the life and death of Maximilian Kolbe. With great empathy – and his life-affirming esprit which again and again manifests itself in the book – he narrates the life of a man who stands by his belief and his ideals, to the last extremity.