A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's careerThe first full-length play The Ride Across Lake Constance, is one of Handke's best-known works. It deals directly with one of Handke's favorite themes: the realities of theater itself, independent of the offstage world, and the way language (dialogue) and objects (props) operate in the skewed world of the stage.Therein it anticipa...

In this haunting suite of three fictions, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke cements his reputation as one of the most talented writers of the Twentieth CenturyIn "The Long Way Around", a European scientist in Alaska finds himself in isolated "places and spaces" that are disturbed when he relocates to California, a disruption that ultimately drives him back home."The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire" follows an autobiographical narrator to Provence, to the mountai...

The first of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that "portrays the…breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger" (The New York Times).The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a fe...

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the nerves of her suicide."So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as h...

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke—one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original worksOn a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young wo...

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE'Portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus' The Stranger' The New York TimesJoseph Bloch, a once-famous goalkeeper turned construction worker, commits a random murder without thought or regret. As he wanders the streets, from hotel to bar, cinema to tram stop, experiencing strange and violent encounters on the way, he finds himself, and everything around him, dis...

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for GodotKaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes c...

“[Handke is] a supremely talented writer . . . The Ballad of the Last Guest conjures the spirit of [Kafka and Camus].” —Tobias Grey, Financial Times"Magnificently moving . . . [Handke] connects us, almost against our will, to the eternal." —Bailey Trela, The Threepenny ReviewA novel about a man who returns home, only to find that home is now unrecognizable, by the Nobel laureate Peter Handke....

At the beginning of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel A Moment of True Feeling, Gregor Keuschnig awakens from a nightmare in which he has committed murder, and announces, "From today on, I shall be leading a double life."The duplicity, however, lies only in Keuschnig's mind; his everyday life as the press attaché for the Austrian Embassy in Paris continues much as before: routine paperwork, walks in the city, futile intimacies with his family and his ...

Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's Repetition tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor.He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world...

A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in EnglishQuiet Places brings together Peter Handke's forays into the border regions of life and story, upending the distinction between literature and the literary essay. Proceeding from the specificity of place (the mountains of Carinthia and Spain, the hinterlands of Paris) to specific objects (the jukebox, the boletus mushroom) to the ir...

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, short novel about one man's conflict with himself and his journey toward resolution.During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator. The pharmacist is known and well-respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nat...