Peter Handke Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972)
  2. Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974)
  3. A Moment of True Feeling (1977)
  4. Left-handed Woman (1978)
  5. Across (1986)
  6. Repetition (1988)
  7. The Afternoon of a Writer (1989)
  8. My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay (1998)
  9. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (2000)
  10. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (2007)
  11. Don Juan: His Own Version (2010)
  12. The Moravian Night (2016)
  13. The Great Fall (2018)
  14. The Fruit Thief (2022)

Omnibus

  1. Two Novels (1979)
  2. Three by Peter Handke (1985)

Collections

  1. The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (1974)
  2. Slow Homecoming (1985)
  3. Peter Handke Plays (1997)

Plays

  1. Kaspar (1967)
  2. Offending the Audience (1971)
  3. The Ride Across Lake Constance (1973)
  4. They Are Dying Out (1975)
  5. Absence (1990)
  6. Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or the Art of Asking (1996)

Novellas

  1. Storm Still (2014)

Non fiction

  1. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1975)
  2. The Weight of the World (1984)
  3. The Jukebox (1994)
  4. Once Again for Thucydides (1995)
  5. A Journey to the Rivers (1997)
  6. Till Day You Do Part (2018)
  7. Quiet Places (2022)

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Peter Handke Books Overview

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

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 who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his 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’ Bill Marx, Boston Sunday Globe.

Short Letter, Long Farewell

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.

Across

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 pas*ses 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 invisble threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.

My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay

In his latest novel, acclaimed author Peter Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer who explores the world and describes his many severed relationships ranging from a fragile connection with his son to a failed marriage to a doomed love with a former Miss Yugoslavia. This is a mysterious, haunting work, considered somewhat autobiographical.

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

A short, powerful new novel by one of the greatest writers in the German languageOn 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 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.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

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 biography, she journeys through the Spanish Sierra de Gredos and the region of La Mancha to meet him. As she travels by allterrain vehicle, bus, and finally on foot, the nameless protagonist encounters five way stations that become the stuff of her biography and the biography of the modern world, a world in which genuine images and unmediated experiences have been exploited and falsified by commercialization and by the voracious mass media.
In this visionary novel, 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. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is also a very human book of yearning and the ancient quest for
love, peopled with memorable characters from multiple historical periods and imbued with Handke’s inimitable ability to portray universal, inner worldly adventures that blend past, future, present, and dreamtime.

Don Juan: His Own Version

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 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. This 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, 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.

Slow Homecoming

Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self questioning and self discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy. The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, The Lesson of Mont Sainte Victoire, identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that C zanne painted again and again. Finally, Child Story is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman and his love for his growing daughter.

Peter Handke Plays

Offending the Audience: ‘A dissection of our expectations about what ought to happen in the theatre.’ Observer Self Accusation: ‘A cunning and ironic attack on bureaucratic moral guilt.’ Observer Kaspar is based on the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a sixteen year old boy who appeared from nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828 and who had to be taught to speak from scratch. Handke’s play is a downright attack on the way language is used by a corrupt society to depersonalize the individual. My Foot My Tutor: ‘Handke has here written an hour long play without words that may at first look like a piece of audience provocation but that finishes up as sheer theatrical poetry.’ GuardianIn The Ride Across Lake Constance, a group of characters known only by the names of the actors who perform the parts talk and play games together and skate over the thin ice that separates them from unspoken danger: ‘Intensely theatrical…
an author for whom playwriting seems akin to tightrope walking.’ The Times They Are Dying Out puts the pillars of the bourgeoisie under the microscope to reveal an alien race, suffocated by rationality, unable to cope with untamed subjective impulses and shows an ‘uncanny knack for making the familiar seem strange’ Plays and Players.

Kaspar

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. 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.

Absence

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.

Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or the Art of Asking

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.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Peter Handke’s mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life which spanned the Na*zi 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 Sorrow Beyond Dreams her son sits down to record what he knows, or thinks he knows, about his mother’s life and death before, in his words, ‘the dull speechlessness the extreme speechlessness’ of grief takes hold forever. And yet the experience of speechlessness, as it marks both suffering and love, lies at the heart of Handke’s brief but unforgettable elegy. This austere, scrupulous, and deeply moving book is one of the finest achievements of a great contemporary writer.

Once Again for Thucydides

Once Again for Thucydides‘ is a collection of twelve short journals Peter Handke wrote on trips around the world, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, from Salzburg to the sea of Hakkaido in Japan. In each journal, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their ‘simple, unadorned validity.’ What results is a word of remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of such random things as a tree, a shoeshine man, a boat loading on a pier, and discovers their inner workings and mystery. Always, his writing hints at the unknown. Describing the snow melting in a garden or falling during an inland train ride through Japan, the glowworms illuminating the plains in Friuli, the tidal waters flowing and receding off the Atlantic coast of Spain, these amazing little ‘epics’ reveal a narrator obsessed with the wonders of detail and marveling, as are we, at the scope and variety of the natural world. In the words of German writer Gerhard Meier, ‘Once Again for Thucydides‘ ends up being ‘a courageous and defiantly independent book.’

Till Day You Do Part

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the she in Beckett s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke s own work such as The Left handed Woman. Handke prefaces the monologue in Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light with a description of two stone figures. While the male figure remains as dead and gone as anyone can, the female bursts into life, and her monologue gradually focuses on Krapp s use of pauses and language to dominate the other characters in the Beckett play. Ultimately, however, her complaints and critique of Krapp become a declaration of her love for Krapp or at least an affirmation of their attachment, as the two of them are ultimately bound together, perhaps even inseparable. Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.

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