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[...]

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 com[...]

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.
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"The Sunday edition of the "Karntner Volkszeitung "carried the following item under 'Local News' 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'"So opens "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, "the eminent Austrian novelist and[...]

"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 Han[...]

Peter Handke is not only regarded as one of the most important contemporary authors of German literature, but also as one of the most controversial. In this volume, literary scholars and their colleagues undertake a critical assessment, examining the literary, aesthetic, and political waypoints, loc[...]

Der 45-jährige Filip Kobal berichtet von einer Reise, die ihn als knapp

20-Jährigen im Sommer 1960 auf den Spuren seines verschollenen älteren

Bruders Gregor vom heimatlichen Dorf Rinkenbach in Kärnten in das benachbarte

Slowenien, das Land seiner Vorfahr[...]