Peter Handke

Peter Handke

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. One of the most acclaimed of modern novelists in any language, he is also a dramatist, poet, screenwriter (often in collaboration with Win Wenders), director, and translator (of Aeschylus and the novels of Walker Percy).

Once Again for Thucydides

Once Again for Thucydides is a collection of seventeen “micro-epics” written by Peter Handke on trips around the world, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, from Salzburg to the sea of Hokkaido in Japan. In each journal, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their “simple, unadorned validity.” What results is a work of remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of random objects––an ash tree, a shoeshine man, hats in a crowd, a boat loading on a pier––and discovers their inner workings and mystery.…
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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.
—The New York Times
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