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Book Cover for: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Peter Handke

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Peter Handke

The first of Nobel Prize winner 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" (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 Handke's 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" (Boston Sunday Globe).

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Dec 10th, 2007
  • Pages: 144
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Limited and Us - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9780374531065
  • Categories: LiteraryWorld Literature - Austria

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

"Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now...is regarded as one of the most important writers in German." --Richard Locke, The New York Times