Peter Handke: 17 books

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...

This volume of Handke's plays includes two full-length and four shorter plays by the young Austrian playwright. The first of the full-length plays, 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...

A MODERN MASTER'S WRY AND ENTERTAINING TAKE ON HISTORY'S BEST-KNOWN LOVER In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his take on the famous seducer. Don Juan's story—"his own version"—is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose...

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe’s most provocative novelists 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...

A short, powerful new novel by one of the greatest writers in the German language On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is 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...

On the outskirts of a northwestern European riverport 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 life to embark on a quest. Having commissioned a famous writer to undertake her "authentic"...

Kaspar, Peter Handke's first full-length drama--hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot--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....

In his most substaintial novel to date, Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer--a man much like Handke himself--who undergoes a "metamorphosis" from self-assured artist into passive "observer and chronicler." He explores the world and describes his many severed relationships,...

"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...

At the beginning of Peter Handke's novel, 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 atache for the Austrian...

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...

Short Letter, Long Farewell tells the story of a young Austrian--evidently modeled on the author--on a month's journey across the United States. The book opens in Providence, where a letter awaits the un-named narrator from his estranged wife, Judith. "I am in New York," it says. "Please...

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. "A remarkably abstract book even for the very abstract Handke ...Slippery but engrossing work, silkily translated." - Kirkus Reviews

Handke's novel 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...