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).

In this visionary novel, Nobel Prize winner 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.

On the outskirts of a northwestern European river port 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 all-terrain 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.

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is 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.

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

In "The Long Way Around", a European scientist in Alaska finds himself in isolated "places and spaces" that are disturbed when he relocates to California, a disruption that ultimately drives him back home.

"The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire" follows an autobiographical narrator to Provence, to the mountain that fascinated Cezanne, on a quest to restore his sense of self and revitalize his craft.

Finally, "Child Story" reveals a crack in one man's feelings of isolation through a father's reflections on his developing love for his daughter in the first ten years of her life.

Una personal indagación en las relaciones del hombre consigo mismo y con lo que está a su alrededor.

Con motivo del 50 aniversario de Alfaguara, este título, cuyo autor ha sido galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2019, ha sido elegido como uno de los 50 imprescindibles de la historia de la editorial.

«... todo está ahí, y yo no soy nada.»
Goethe, Torcuato Tasso

Una tarde de diciembre, a la luz cambiante del ocaso, un escritor, sentado a su mesa de trabajo, decide dar un paseo por el mundo, deambular por patios, plazas y callejuelas, perderse por arrabales y volver a su casa amparado ya en la oscuridad.

En el camino quedará una doble huella: la de la mirada hacia lo exterior y la de la duda que contempla lo que está dentro de sí. Pero todo será visto como si fuera la primera vez, como si al cerrar los ojos la realidad apareciera en su verdad más pura.

Con La tarde de un escritor, Peter Handke, uno de los más grandes creadores en lengua alemana, prosigue su personal indagación en las relaciones del hombre consigo mismo y con lo que está a su alrededor.

La crítica ha dicho:
«Por un trabajo influyente que, con inventiva lingüística, ha explorado las periferias y la especificidad de la experiencia humana.»
Jurado del Premio Nobel

«Handke se ha vuelto un clásico. [...] Un escritor que traza con su aguda, implacable mirada, y su oído atento, los contornos precisos del aire.»
El País

«Handke pertenece a la camada intelectual de los que hacen de la escritura un testamento incendiario, una diatriba contra las convenciones.»
Antonio Lucas, El Mundo

«Peter Handke, justo ganador del Premio Nobel de Literatura 2019, es el escritor que consiguió que el mundo, no los personajes ni sus conciencias, hablara en monólogo interior y que supiéramos lo que el mundo pensaba y cómo pensaba.»
Alejandro Gándara, El Cultural

«El Premio Nobel -¡por fin!- que Peter Handke acaba de recibir es un reconocimiento y una recompensa a una obra destinada a perdurar durante mucho tiempo.»
Eustaquio Barjau, ABC

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, short 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.

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.

A “challenging and rewarding novel”* from Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke.

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.

“In this smoothly written fable, Handke forcefully summons readers to the recognition that the essence of human life lies in the striving for self-expression even though its perfect realization must always remain elusive.”—*Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably abstract book even for the very abstract Handke... Slippery but engrossing work, silkily translated." - Kirkus Reviews

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

Peter Handke, Premio Nobel de Literatura 2019

Peter Handke (1942) es uno de los escritores actuales más importantes, polémicos y populares en lengua alemana. Sus obras suelen gravitar en torno a las dificultades en la comunicación humana, la soledad o sus consecuencias, con un estilo original que no renuncia nunca al compromiso con la literatura. LA MUJER ZURDA (1976) profundiza en los entresijos de la ruptura de una pareja, revelando al lector la angustia de la crisis de una mujer que no busca la huida a través del espacio, sino en la rutina de sus acciones y de su vivir. La mujer del relato de Handke, como la de la canción que da título al mismo, vive "junto a" otros seres, pero es incapaz de comunicarse con ellos, pues el diálogo, cuando no supone un ataque a la intimidad del interlocutor, constituye sólo una sucesión de monólogos paralelos.

Peter Handke, Premio Nobel de Literatura 2019

Peter Handke (1942) es uno de los escritores actuales más importantes, polémicos y populares en lengua alemana. Sus obras suelen gravitar en torno a las dificultades en la comunicación humana, la soledad o sus consecuencias, con un estilo original que no renuncia nunca al compromiso con la literatura. Publicada en 1989 e impregnada del mismo tono reflexivo de obras como "Ensayo sobre el jukebox" o "Ensayo sobre el día logrado" ENSAYO SOBRE EL CANSANCIO toma este estado como excusa o punto de partida para hilvanar en primera persona ideas que van más allá del mismo, en un discurso en el que lo que se busca no es tanto lo exacto ni lo riguroso como la relación personal con lo que se está explicando.