"The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country's president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film, perhaps his last, in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters...

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of...

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...

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,...

In this visionary novel, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke offers descriptions of objects, relationships, and events that teach readers a renewed way of seeing; he creates a wealth of images to replace those lost to convention and conformity. On the outskirts of a northwestern European river port city lives a powerful woman banker, a public figure admired and hated in equal measure, who has decided to turn from the worlds of high finance and modern...

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...

In this haunting suite of three fictions, Peter Handke, cements his reputation as one of the most talented writers of the Twentieth-Century. In "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 mountain...

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.

"A collection of literary essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke"--