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Book Cover for: Kaspar and Other Plays, Peter Handke

Kaspar and Other Plays

Peter Handke

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Jan 1st, 1970
  • Pages: 152
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9780809015467
  • Categories: European - German

About the Author

Roloff, Michael: - Michael Roloff contributed to Peter Camenzind from Picador.
Handke, Peter: - Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man's-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke's dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."

Praise for this book

"It's not often you come across writing that resounds with the undeniable sense that a writer's life hangs in the balance." --Sam Shepard, Vanity Fair

"Unmistakably one of the best writers we have in that self-discovering tendency in contemporary writing we have chosen to call post-modernism. His plays and novels have steadily and splendidly put to the test many of our essential presumptions about the nature of reality and art." --Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review