Short Letter, Long Farewell

Short Letter, Long Farewell
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1974
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374263183

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America---from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life---or the corpse of an old one---lying just around the corner.

Slow Homecoming

Slow Homecoming
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590173074

By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy. The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cézanne painted again and again. Finally, “Child Story” is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father—not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman—and his love for his growing daughter.

Repetition

Repetition
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 223
Release: 1988-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466807016

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

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye
Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Important Books
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2013-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9788087888506

When Philip Marlowe befriends down-on-his-luck veteran Terry Lennox he gets more than he bargained for. With Lennox's wife dead and Lennox himself on the lam, Marlowe becomes the target for the local cops and a crazy gangster, while getting mixed up with alcoholic writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen. Nothing is what it seems as Marlowe unravels the Wades' scheme to expose the truth behind Lennox's facade. The most autobiographical of his novels, The Long Goodbye was considered by Chandler to be his best work. One of the preeminent examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, The Long Goodbye has been adapted for radio, film and television, and received the 1955 Edgar Award for Best Novel. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke
Author: Martin Brady
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9042032480

Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Authors' Note -- Introduction -- Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration -- Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty -- Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell to Alice in the Cities -- Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion in Wrong Move -- Leafing through Wings of Desire -- Conclusion -- Filmographies -- Bibliography -- Index.

The Moravian Night

The Moravian Night
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374715610

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe’s most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer’s recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator’s and the continent’s past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew’s-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “Handke’s sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world.” The Moravian Night is at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world literature’s great voices.

A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1774649063

''A Farewell to Arms'' is Hemingway's classic set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. It's about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of ''A Farewell to Arms'' cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I."

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1782270302

"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 Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as he perceives them. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. Yet well into middle age, living in the Austrian village of her birth, she still remains haunted by her dreams.

A Moment of True Feeling

A Moment of True Feeling
Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 119
Release: 1977-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466806958

At the beginning of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel A Moment of True Feeling, Gregor Keuschnig awakens from a nightmare in which he has committed murder, and announces, "From today on, I shall be leading a double life." The duplicity, however, lies only in Keuschnig's mind; his everyday life as the press atache for the Austrian Embassy in Paris continues much as before: routine paperwork, walks in the city, futile intimacies with his family and his mistress. But Keuschnig is oblivious to it all, merely simulating his previous identity while he searches for a higher significance, a mystical moment of true sensation which can free him from what the novel calls life's "dreadful normalcy." Convinced that, if he fails, life's meaning will be revealed to him only when it is too late, he looks for portents everywhere. Keuschnig's search takes him through all of Paris. At every step, his feelings are interwoven with acute observation of its streets, buildings, cafes, parks, sky. It is an intimate and evocative journey, in a city that is at once supportive and familiar, strange and provocative.