In the town of Slurry, New York, post-war recession has bitten. Claire Zachanassian, improbably beautiful and impenetrably terrifying, returns to her hometown as the world's richest woman. The locals hope her arrival signals a change in their fortunes, but they soon realise that prosperity will only come at a terrible price... Friedrich Durrenmatt's visionary revenge play, one of the great achievements of modern German-language theatre, has been transported to mid-twentieth-century America by the acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner. This revelatory new adaptation of The Visit opened in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre, London, in February 2020, directed by Jeremy Herrin, and starring Lesley Manville and Hugo Weaving.

Friedrich Durrenmatt is considered one of the most significant playwrights of our time. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. In this ALTA National Translation Award-winning new translation of what many critics consider his finest play, Joel Agee gives a fresh lease to a classic of twentieth-century theater. Durrenmatt once wrote of himself: "I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness," and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Durrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place "somewhere in Central Europe" and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, swiftly turns a depressed area into a boom town. But the condition attached to her largesse, which the locals learn of only after they are enmeshed, is murder. Durrenmatt has fashioned a macabre and entertaining parable that is a scathing indictment of the power of greed and confronts the perennial questions of honor, loyalty, and community.

"'It's a promise, Frau Moser,' the inspector said, impelled solely by the desire to leave this place. "'On your eternal salvation?' "The inspector hesitated. 'On my eternal salvation,' he finally said. What else could he do? When a young girl is found brutally murdered in a Swiss mountain forest, the brilliant Inspector Matthai can't put the case behind him. Not even when a local felon is arrested. Not even once the suspect has confessed. Matthai promises the girl's mother that he will stop at nothing to find the real killer. Adapted into a Hollywood film, The Pledge is the chilling story of a man in desperate search of the truth. A man driven to sacrifice everything, to commit acts of cruelty and obsession in a desperate search for a killer he can't find.

The full German text of Durrenmatt's play is accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The full German text of Durrenmatt's play is accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context."

In The Visit (original title Der Besuch der alten Dame), Claire Zachanassian, now a multimillion heiress and an older woman, returns to the impoverished town of her youth with a dreadful bargain: in exchange for returning the town to prosperity through her vast wealth, she wants the townspeople to kill the man who jilted her. From its subtle exploration of parochial politics to its horrific climax, The Visit shows a population willing to sacrifice loyalty and scruples in the pursuit of riches. It is a drama of the absurd that reduces human nature to its most ridiculous depths. Durrenmatt was one of the most important figures of modern European drama and The Visit remains both a powerful critique of twentieth century civilisation and an outstanding piece of experimental theatre.

A respected professor is dead - shot in a crowded Zurich restaurant, in front of dozens of witnesses. The murderer calmly turned himself in to the police. So why has he now hired a lawyer to clear his name? And why has he chosen the drink-soaked, disreputable Spat to defend him? As he investigates, Spat finds himself obsessed, drawn ever deeper into a case of baffling complexity until he reaches a deadly conclusion: justice can be restored only by a crime. This is a captivating neo-noir classic from the master of the genre. The Execution of Justice is a dark, wicked satire on the legal system and a disturbing, if ambivalent, allegory on guilt, justice, violence and morality.

The Physicists is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of Europe's foremost dramatists and the author of the internationally celebrated The Visit. The world's greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Moebius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, the other who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? For Moebius has uncovered the mystery of the universe--and therefore the key to its destruction--and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the Earth. Added to this treacherous combination is the world-renowned psychiatrist in charge, the hunchbacked Mathilde von Zahnd, who has some diabolical plans of her own. With wry, penetrating humor, The Physicists probes beneath the surface of modern existence and, like Marat/Sade, questions whether it is the mad who are the truly insane.

Friedrich Durrenmatt was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, a talent on par with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. A prolific writer of letters, poems, novels, and short fiction, he also wrote essays on literary forms as well as philosophy and politics that provide a window onto his world and his work, demonstrating both his critical acumen and the breadth of his talents as a stylist. Gathered from throughout his long career, the writings featured in Durrenmatt's Selected Essays are by turns playful and polemical, poetic and provocative, mordantly comical and deadly serious. Critics have often been perplexed by Durrenmatt's sudden shifts - from stage to prose and back, from comedy to tragedy and vice versa, from writing to drawing. In this volume, the full range of his interests in arts and letters-and their relationships to each other - becomes evident. In one section, a cluster of essays on the theater illuminate his idiosyncratic dramaturgical theories, drawing on examples from Attic comedy to Schiller, Brecht, and professional wrestling. In another, his philosophical essays mix his passionate reflections on ethical and political questions with his skeptical forays into metaphysics. And in autobiographical pieces such as the monumental "Vallon de l'Ermitage," Durrenmatt offers an intimate look at his "web of time" - the places where he traveled and the people with whom he lived and worked. Suffused with melancholy, flashes of tenderness, and the author's inimitable sense of the grotesque and absurd, these essays provide a compelling look at Durrenmatt's prodigious strength as a writer of nonfiction.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, "The Visit," With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Durrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Durrenmatt's essays, gathered in this third volume of "Selected "Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Durrenmatt's best-known essays, such as "Theater Problems" and "Monster Essay on Justice and Law," as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States "increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism"). This third volume of "Selected Writings "also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as "The Winter War in Tibet," a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth--a Plato's Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Durrenmatt has long been considered a great writer--but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.

Set in a small town in Switzerland, "The Pledge "centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim's mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer--with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Durrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee's skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.
One of Durrenmatt's most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, "The Pledge" was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In "The Judge and His Hangman," Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in "Suspicion," Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence.

Together Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt are not only two of the most esteemed Swiss writers of the twentieth century, but arguably two of the most important European writers since World War II. The remarkable letters gathered here document their unique, unlikely, and extraordinary friendship.

This collection of correspondence offers a picture of two temperaments that could not have been more different. As their letters show, at first their friendship was tentative, both critical and respectful, as one might imagine of two contemporary literary giants. Then, under the pressure of their increasing fame, Frisch and Durrenmatt's letters became more teasing in spirit and began to carry a noted undertone of irony. Finally, perhaps inevitably, the friendship became seriously endangered and failed.

Available in English for the first time, this collection includes an introduction by Peter Ruedi that places the letters within the context of the authors' lives and works, as well as the larger historical events of the time. Detailed notes, a chronology, photographs, and facsimiles of the original letters complete the book, which will be engaging reading for admirers of Frisch and Durrenmatt as well as fans of modern German writing in general.

INSPECTOR BARLACH HAS A YEAR TO LIVE, BUT HE'S NOT GOING QUIETLY When Inspector Barlach notices that a successful Swiss surgeon bears a striking resemblance to an infamous Nazi war criminal, a suspicion begins to gnaw away at him - could they be one and the same person? Determined to expose the monster behind the surgeon's mask, the ailing inspector checks himself into the doctor's exclusive clinic. But all does not go to plan, and soon Barlach realizes that he is at the mercy of his own prey. Will he find a way out before it's too late? Suspicion is a dark mystery about a dying man's struggle to destroy a wickedness

In Friedrich Durrenmatt's experimental thriller "The Assignment," the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched--including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and terrorism.
F.'s labyrinthine quest for the truth is Durrenmatt's fictionalized warning against the dangers of a technologically advanced society that turns everyday life into one of constant scrutiny. Joel Agee's elegant translation will introduce a fresh generation of English-speaking readers to one of European literature's masters of language, suspense, and dystopia.
"The narrative is accelerated from the start. . . . As the novella builds to its horripilating climax, we realize the extent to which all values have thereby been inverted. "The Assignment "is a parable of hell for an age consumed by images."--"New York Times Book Review"
"His most ambitious book . . . dark and devious . . . almost obsessively drawn to mankind's most fiendish crimes."--"Chicago"" Tribune"
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"A tour-de-force . . . mesmerizing."--"Village Voice"""

The scene is a madhouse and the focus is on three inmates who are nuclear physicists. One thinks he is Newton and another, Einstein. The third has visitations from Solomon. They appear to be nice, likeable lunatics, but nothing is as simple as it seems. Are they really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? Who is earnest and who is the spy? Gradually we learn that each has been led down the path to moral destruction, past the signposts of truth, the purity of science, and personal responsibility. The asylum to which their paths have led them seems much saner than the mad world they've left behind.4 women, 16 men