“I would die if I were no longer able to write,” Julien Green once said. The French author with roots in the USA is one of 129 writers featured in the book “Schreib oder stirb” (Write or Die). You will come across many famous names while reading it. These include Heinrich von Kleist, Richard Wright, Franz Kafka and Simone de Beauvoir, but many little known or completely unknown authors, such as Ciro Alegría, Henry Parland and Munschi Premtschand, are also covered. In short portraits, always restricted to precisely two pages, Charles Linsmayer – the author of our literature series on the Swiss Abroad – outlines the life and work of the writers. Despite the brevity of the articles, Linsmayer succeeds each time in recreating a world. The 129 life stories are 129 encounters of a very special kind.
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