Peter Handke

The first of 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" (Richard Locke, The New York Times). The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker …

Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life—which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy—she struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: "I'm not human any more." Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.In A …

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 …

Short Letter, Long Farewell is a 1972 novel by the Austrian writer Peter Handke. It tells the story of a young Austrian writer who travels across the United States in search of his wife. It shares many themes and motifs with the film Alice in the Cities from 1974, directed by Handke's frequent collaborator Wim …

A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records -- both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations -- the details of Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert …

An Austrian writer looks back on his failed relationships, from his tenuous connection to his son to an abortive love affair with a onetime Miss Yugoslavia, struggling to do justice to their complexity in his next novel.