Literary highlights in October

While the light fades a little more each day, a magical month awaits with shared reading, fabulous insights, an author who finds his view of the world through writing, despite all adversity - and a glacier that not only brings lost loved ones forward, but also shows us the passing of time.

It's actually quite simple: silent because it's silent, reading because it's reading and rave because it's short and snappy. This turns an otherwise rather solitary activity into a communal experience. Everyone brings their own reading material, be it a book, reader or magazine - and makes themselves comfortable. These days, the Litar Gallery also has a special reading room where the "Merz Welt" exhibition can be explored in passing. Still have questions? Then let's go and read into autumn.

Where, if not in fairy tales, can anything still be possible? The reversal of all known laws that turn "real life" on its head. Because sometimes you have to turn something around to make it fairytale-like again. The good wins, but there is beauty in ugliness. Injustice is righted, the underdog wins. The oppressed become free. Fairy tales are often wrongly regarded as old and dusty, but in this writing workshop they are put right again.

Wednesday, 22 October, Story Bakery, 17:15 - 21:15

A young man wants to get to know the world through writing and realises that he has to go out into the social present, according to the motto: "I'm going the way that doesn't exist and that I still want to go". So be it, he makes a career, the flow of life carries him into the highest circles. But after gaining an insight into the machinations of politics and business, he has to realise: That doesn't have to be his path. So he retreats to his desk, fights against financial hardship, rejection - and for his partner, who has been paralysed by a stroke. And in the end, he reaches his goal: in his explorations of the 20th century and his own biographical twists and turns, the narrator's ego emerges ever more clearly. A mature, rich and thoroughly intelligent evening with Swiss Book Prize winner Christian Haller.

The great heat of summer 2003 not only brought good wine. It also caused the glaciers to melt faster, and many a victim that the glacier had taken many years ago was released. So it happens that a woman sees her young fiancé again after 54 years. A story straight out of a fairy tale, and yet it is true.

With a mixture of drama and poetry, the theatre author and writer tells a story about self-determination, heaviness and acceptance. And takes the audience into a world in which time seems to have frozen.

Saturday, 25 October, Zürich liest, 3 - 4 pm
Free radio play performances throughout the festival in the ETH main building