Dürrenmatt's essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theatre. His best known essays are Theatre Problems, The Bridge, The Brain, Vinter, Monster Essay on Justice and Law and 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.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

›Nocturnal Conversation with a Scorned Man:‹ A Curriculum of Our Times and for Dürrenmatt readers. In ›Stranitzky and the National Hero‹, the victims of politics rise to power. In ›The Vega Enterprise‹, Venus becomes a penal colony.

A suspenseful tale of a police inspector's unremitting search for a psychopathic killer his superiors claim does not exist. But more than a novel of crime and detection, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's deeply moving drama is the eloquent account of a decent man's gradual decay. With grim irony, the master storyteller shows how a dedicated law-enforcer's obsession for truth and justice can lead him to bait a trap as morally offensive as the evil strategy used by the maniacal murderer he relentlessly pursues.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

Dürrenmatt's essays 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. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

In 1955 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to reinvestigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. ›The Execution of Justice‹ is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the law.

Dürrenmatt's essays 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. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

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.

Dürrenmatt's essays 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. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

The texts presented in ›Thought Fugue‹ are records of works in progress: the typescripts, from Dürrenmatt's literary estate, of materials (each one a complete unit), as well as of all essays and stories, which he had planned for additional volumes of ›Materials‹ and which he expanded and revised numerous times between 1987 and the end of 1990. Each text presented here is the final version of the piece concerned. From the Contents: ›Prometheus‹, ›Thought Fugue‹, ›On Imagined Constructs and Emotional Universes with a Parable‹, ›The Dinosaurs and the Law‹, ›Dramaturgy of Imaginative Power‹, ›The Attempt‹, ›Cabala of Physics‹, ›Farewell from the Theatre‹, ›Postscript to Achterloo IV‹.

Dürrenmatt's essays 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. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt became one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century. But from our perspective today, we can see that Dürrenmatt's career from start to finish embraced fictional works whose quality and significance are undeniable. His novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. The best known and most successful of them are The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion, The Pledge, Greek Man Seeks Greek Wife, Justice, The Tunnel, Traps, The Minotaur and The Assignment.