Interviews are an art form in and of themselves – the German journalist Thomas David talks in depth with the great figures of English-language literature of the past twenty years.

Featuring a foreword by Graham Swift.

Thomas David has been in a continuing conversation with contemporary writers since the mid-1990s. He has interviewed big names on individual novels, their writing practice and the social and political subjects of their times. The result is a book on what is essential, not just in writing but also in life.

Thomas David in conversation with
John Banville, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, John Irving, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Ottessa Moshfegh, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, James Salter, Zadie Smith, Muriel Spark, Graham Swift and William Trevor.

Over 4000 pages of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's conversations and interviews of all kinds for newspapers, magazines, radio, or television made over three decades between 1961 and 1990 have been handed down (it was not until the 60s that he began keeping authentically reproduced conversations and interviews). These conversations are a unique source of insights into Dürrenmatt's views of the world and reality, his aesthetic and material tenets, and the circumstances which accompanied his work.

Two writers offer an insight into their conversations. Whether on a sun lounger or at the bar, by the sea or in the city, these two are fizzing with wit. Everything is potential material for conversation: swimming trunks, weddings, glitter, LSD, cooking, money, birthdays - the more everyday or odd it is, the better! And because no life is purely fun, not even for the famous, the conversations even take a serious turn at times. But only at times.

In interviews with Felizitas von Schönborn, renowned Austrian artist Paul Flora fully recounts for the first time, with his worldly scepticism and casual pessimism, the remarkable, amusing and profound events that have taken place on his extraordinary path through life.

Alfred Andersch and Max Frisch met one another for the first time in 1957, in the legendary Café Odeon in Zurich. In his role as a radio editor, Andersch asks Frisch, three years his senior, for the most daring and shocking extract possible from his recently completed novel ›Homo Faber‹. Shortly after that, Frisch writes to him for the first time. At the beginning of the sixties, when Frisch is living in Rome with Ingeborg Bachmann after having left his family, their correspondence intensifies. In 1965, Frisch relocates with his new, younger lover Marianne Oellers, his future wife, to Berzona in Ticino, where the Anderschs' owned a house from 1958 onwards. Frisch finds himself in illustrious company: as well as Alfred Andersch, Golo Mann and the designer and typographer Jan Tschichold live in the small mountain village too. They would go hiking together and meet in food stores for a good chat. But the idyll did not last long, for the tensions between the two pugnacious spirits Frisch and Andersch increased until the latter temporarily broke off all contact.

Based on her in-depth, first-hand conversations, Felizitas von Schönborn has been able to bring together the views and core values of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism. This book is as significant for interested laymen as it is for people with a particular involvement in politics, philosophy and religion. It is concerned as much with personal happiness and the search for meaning in life as with ecological problems and world peace, because: »Happiness exists on many levels. I visualise happiness as a harmonious interplay between inner peace in the heart of the individual and outer peace among the peoples of the world. It is my wish that all of the inhabitants of the Earth can enjoy as much prosperity as possible. Poverty and misery do not create a happy life. One must be able to satisfy one's basic needs; one requires food, clean water and a roof over one's head. This is true of all cultures.«

The letters published here for the first time document the unusual and not always easy friendship between Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers: Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The literary world linked Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers inseparably together like a pair of comedians, something by which both authors were sometimes amused but more often irritated. Their common ground was their experience of Switzerland, isolated and spared from conflict between 1939 and 1945, and the guilt which the country incurred during World War II; their preoccupation with and different approaches to Kierkegaard and Brecht; their dissimilar but equally definite criticism of the army and anticommunism; their work at the Zurich Schauspielhaus theatre with the dramaturgist Kurt Hirschfeld whom they both admired. An epilogue by Peter Rüedi, for many years a critic of both authors, points out some connections between the letters, the authors' lives and work, and contemporary history.