Selected Writings _ Volume 1 _ Plays

Durrenmatt, Friedrich; Agee, Joel (trans); Northcott, Kenneth J. (ed & intro)

ISBN 10: 0226174263 / ISBN 13: 9780226174266

Published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006

About this Item

black cloth, grey lettering, dust jacket, 313 pp Standard shipping (no tracking or insurance) / Priority (with tracking) / Custom quote for large or heavy orders.

Seller Inventory # 92339

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Selected Writings _ Volume 1 _ Plays
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226174263
• ISBN 13: 9780226174266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Cloth/dust jacket Octavo.
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Theatre

About this title

Synopsis

The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (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, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.

Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.

Dürrenmatt 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.

About the Authors

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was born in the village of Konolfingen, near Berne, Switzerland. He wrote prolifically during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, taking particular interest in human rights and the preservation of Israel. He is the author of numerous books published by the University of Chicago Press, including The Pledge.

Joel Agee has translated numerous German authors into English, including Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Elias Canetti. In 2005 he received the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award for his translation of Hans Erich Nossack's The End: Hamburg 1943. He is the author of two memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear.