New Release Books by Peter Handke

A collection of three superb essays from a renowned prose stylist attempts to explore how language can work its magic on us, as the author meditates on subjects ranging from his Austrian boyhood to the music of the Beatles.

This short novel by Peter Handke is the biography of the narrator's mother. It is set against the backdrop of events in Austrian history, with emphasis upon the Anschluss of 1938 and the resulting hardships endured by rural women. These pressures, in the case of the narrator's mother, resulted in her suicide.

An eclectic band of people explore the outskirts of an unnamed city--and the borders of reality--in a bizarre tale of revelation

Here, in one edition, are two provocative novels that show why, as John Updike has written in The New Yorker, "Handke is widely regarded by many as the best writer in his language". The two stories, "A Moment of True Feeling", and "The Left-Handed Woman", confirm Handke's enormous gifts as a writer.

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.

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

This book presents two plays, both of which are translated into English for the first time. 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 questions. The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other takes place in a city square where more than four hundred characters pass by one another without speaking a single word.

Andreas Loser, a teacher of classical languages and amateur archaeologist, abandons his routine, ordered, and familiar life to embark on an odyssey of self-discovery after he impulsively kills a man responsible for defacing a beech tree with a swastika

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

This volume contains 22 stories and novellas, many appearing in English for the first time. Among the authors represented are Peter Handke, Alfred Andersch, Stefan Andres, Jurgen Becker, Ulla Merkewicz, Elisabeth Borchers, Gisela Elsner and Max von der Grun.

Examines the Balkan conflict from a Serbian perspective that includes a heated critique of the Western media

The text of this family drama focuses on the relationship between two brothers and their sister. The central theme concerns a dispute over family property, but in a wider context the play contrasts traditional village life with the modern city and the isolated lives of manual workers.

''Peter Handke's work is amongst the most strikingly original of all post-war European writing' (Times Educational Supplement) Offending the Audience is a dissection of our expectations about what ought to happen in the theatre. Self-Accusation is 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 depersonalise the individual; My Foot My Tutor is a mime for two actors - 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' (Guardian). In 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).''

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

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 atache 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.

Peter Handke's dramatic poem Walk about the Villages is the fourth part of Handke's "homecoming cycle", whose other three parts (A Slow Homecoming, The Lesson of St. Victoire, and A Child Story) can be found under the American title A Slow Homecoming. The underlying story line of Walk about the Villages could not be simpler. The "prodigal" writer Gregor returns to his home village. He and his brother Hans, a construction worker, and his shopkeeper sister have a dispute over the disposition of the house which the parents had built and the land which they had cleared with their own hands many years before. Within this straightforward conflict, Handke touches upon almost every aspect of our existence. It is a lyrical play, a poetic drama on the order of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. It is an "Everyman and Everywoman" dramatic poem for our time.

A combination of professional notebook and personal diary, The Weight of the World records, over a period of two years, the details of Peter Handke's daily life in Paris. Along with references to mentors such as Goethe, Truffaut, and Robert DeNiro, the journal recounts his delicate relationship with his daughter and a brief hospital stay. The result is a rare portrait of a world-renowned artist at work.

Een jonge elektromonteur zonder werk, die eerder een beroemde voetbalkeeper is geweest, leidt een zwervend bestaan en begaat bijna terloops een moord.

"Welcoming the Board of Directors by Peter Handke is presented in the first person as a sort of monologue, a speech given by a presenter at a failing company's board meeting. The entire welcome is overwhelmed by explanations of horrible mishaps: the porter's son's death, the windows of the building being broken and the roof about to collapse, directors wandering through the deep snow. In the midst of these rambling and confused explanations, the president attempts to thank everyone in the room and assure them the company is not about to collapse. Eventually he becomes trapped in a verbal loop thanks and welcomes."--BookRags description.