Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke--the extravagantly talented Austrian playwright of chutzpah, novelist of sensibility, poet of linguistic games (Kirkus)--ponders the life and early death of his mother

The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under 'Local News': 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'

So opens A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Handke's reckoning with his mother's life--which spanned the rise of the Nazis, World War II, and postwar suffering--and death. Both stark and lyrical, full of love, anger, admiration, and a keen sense of history, this slim book reveals Handke at his most lucid and direct. It is the most moving and accessible work in his distinguished career; it is indispensable (Bill Marx, The Boston Globe).

By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America--from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life--or the corpse of an old one--lying just around the corner.

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 female movie cashier is mirrored by Handke's use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world (Boston Sunday Globe).

A career-spanning collection of essays by the Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in English

Quiet 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 irreducible particularity of our moods and mental impressions, these works--each a novella in its own right--offer rare insight into the affinities that can develop between a storyteller and the unlikeliest of subjects. Here, Handke posits a reevaluation of the possibilities and proper concerns of literature in a style unmistakably his own.

This collection unites the three essays from The Jukebox with two new works: Essay on a Mushroom Maniac, the story of a friend's descent into and ascent from the depths of obsession, and Essay on Quiet Places, a memoiristic tour d'horizon of bathrooms and their place in Handke's life and work. Featuring masterful translations by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim, this collection encapsulates the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers.

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 around him.

Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by [Repetition]. - Publishers Weekly

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 mistress. But Keuschnig is oblivious to it all, merely simulating his previous identity while he searches for a higher significance, a mystical moment of true sensation which can free him from what the novel calls life's dreadful normalcy. Convinced that, if he fails, life's meaning will be revealed to him only when it is too late, he looks for portents everywhere.

Keuschnig's search takes him through all of Paris. At every step, his feelings are interwoven with acute observation of its streets, buildings, cafes, parks, sky. It is an intimate and evocative journey, in a city that is at once supportive and familiar, strange and provocative.

In Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman, a young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother.

One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. And instinctively Marianne knows she must fend for herself and her young son now, before that time comes.

She sends Bruno away and settles down to a life alone, at first experiencing moments of panic, restlessly wandering in rooms grown stifling. The stillness of the house wears her down, and she starts taking long walks, or visiting with her close friend, Franziska.

Gradually, what began as a selfish escape from the prospects of the future becomes in fact liberation. The environment she'd always hated--a no man's land of identical houses, with all curtains drawn--recedes; her relationships with those dear to her become less threatening, less necessary; and Marianne finds a new pattern for her life and the strength to go on alone.

Handke adapted the novel himself into a film of the same name in 1978.

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke--one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works

On 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 woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters--with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day--are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait.

In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke offers three intimate, eloquent meditations that map a self-reflexive journey from Alaska to the Austria of his childhood, while illuminating the act of writing itself.

In his Essay on Tiredness, Handke transforms an everyday experience--often precipitated by boredom--into a fascinating exploration of the world of slow motion, differentiating degrees of fatigue, the types of weariness, its rejuvenating effects, as well as its erotic, cultural, and political implications.

The title essay is Handke's attempt to understand the significance of the jukebox, a quest which leads him, while on a trip in Spain, into the literature of the jukebox, the history of the music box, and memories of the Beatles' music, in turn elucidating various stages of his own life.

And in his Essay on the Successful Day, for which there is no prescription, Handke invents a picture of tranquility, using a self-portrait by Hogarth as his point of departure to describe a state of being at peace.

Playful, reflective, insightful, and entertaining, The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling constitutes a literary triptych that redefines the art of the essay and challenges the form of the short story, confirming Peter Handke's stature as one of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers (Lawrence Graver, The New York Times Book Review).

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, 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 nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms.

One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations and reflections. The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, travelling into the Alps with two companions--a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet--where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives through a tunnel and has a premonition of death, then finds himself in a surreal, foreign land. In a final series of bizarre, cathartic events, the driver regains his speech and is taken back to his pharmacy--back to his former life, but forever changed.

A powerful, poetic exploration of language, longing and dislocation in the human experience, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House reveals Handke at his magical best.

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 Godot

Kaspar 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 creative--doing his own thing with words; for this he is destroyed.

In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character speak-ins, Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.

A challenging and rewarding novel* from Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke.

The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler--as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

In this smoothly written fable, Handke forcefully summons readers to the recognition that the essence of human life lies in the striving for self-expression even though its perfect realization must always remain elusive.--*Publishers Weekly

In these two plays, here translated into English for the first time, the renowned Austrian writer Peter Handke inquires into the boundaries and life-affirming qualities of language. At a time when language no longer seems to serve the purposes of a genuine human community, Handke asks, is such a community possible?

In Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or The Art of Asking, a cockeyed optimist and a spoilsport lead a group of characters to the hinterland of their imaginations, where they search not for the right answers but for the right questions. The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other takes place in a city square where more than 400 characters pass by one another without speaking a single word. Handke here journeys to the brink of speech: Who is that person passing by? Is she on her way, or is she coming back? Is her story ahead of her, or is it behind? In the silence of the square, Handke returns the gift of speech, the magic of telling a story, to the spectator.

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke offers a wry and entertaining take on history's most famous seducer as he takes a respite from his stressful existence

Don Juan's story--his own version--is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. Don Juan: His Own Version is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.

In this brief and wry volume, Peter Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

A novel about a man who returns home, only to find that home is now unrecognizable, by the Nobel laureate Peter Handke.

Gregor returns home from another continent. The landscape, formerly dotted with small villages, has been absorbed into the outskirts of a large city, both familiar and foreign at the same time. His father sits playing cards, waiting for him, but Gregor is surprised to find his sister holding an infant. He, the older brother, is to be the child's godfather--though he also carries with him the secret of his younger brother's death.

In the end, Gregor is never quite able to stay put. He is drawn out into the world, into the streets and alleys of what is now a city, to the cinema, the soccer stadium, the forest, and above all the old fruit orchard, now overgrown and beyond saving. As he walks, the present and the past become intertwined--memories of childhood surface, and inner voices enter into dialogue.

Revisiting many of the settings and themes of Peter Handke's previous works, The Ballad of the Last Guest takes stock of the changes that have been wrought on the land--and on human beings --over the course of the twenty-first century.

Two novellas by Peter Handke--his first works to be published since he won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are two novellas by the 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke. The first picks up the story where Handke's last work of fiction, The Fruit Thief (described in The New York Times as an experience of unadulterated literature), left off. Here a man has returned to his home in the suburbs of Paris, only to soon set out again. Why? We learn, over the course of a story redolent of Handke's harrowing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that he is seeking to avenge his mother, who has been unjustly denounced in the pages of a newspaper. The Second Sword is a suspenseful work of self-examination: Will the narrator's journey end in him throwing down the gauntlet?

My Day in the Other Land is the first work written by Handke after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Evoking imagery from the Bible and classical mythology, it portrays a man who has been possessed by demons, causing him to rage endlessly against the inhabitants of his rural village. Aided by his sister, he embarks on a journey to a lake on whose opposite shore lies the other land. What ensues is an exorcism of sorts--and one of Handke's most evocative and original endings. Together, The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are essential new entries in a body of work like no other.

A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career

The 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 anticipates They Are Dying Out, the second full-length play in this volume. In some ways more conventional than many of Handke's plays, They Are Dying Out presents one of his most fascinating protagonists, Quitt, a businessman who first induces a group of colleagues to set up a monopoly and then torpedoes the scheme.

The four short plays that round out the book--Prophecy, Calling for Help, Quodlibet, and My Foot My Tutor--were written before The Ride Across Lake Constance and show Handke moving from the experimental mode of his early work toward the richness and complexity that have marked him as the most important dramatist since Becket.

Together, Handke's plays bear witness to the truth of Richard Gilman's observation that in Handke's theater, language, exposed, assaulted, wrestled with, driven to limits, and pursued still further, begins to take on, like the color returning to the cheeks of a nearly hanged man, the signs of a strange and unexpected resurrection.

Those who gravitate to the regions where fiction, poetry, imaginative flights and speculative fancy converge constitute Handke's natural audience. - Publishers Weekly

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel Across tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisible threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.