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.

"A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career. The first full-length play The Ride Across Lake Constance, is one of Handke's best-known works. It deals directly with one of Handke's favorite themes: the realities of theater itself, independent of the offstage world, and the way language (dialogue) and objects (props) operate in the skewed world of the stage. Therein it anticipates They Are Dying Out, the second full-length play in this volume. In some ways more conventional than many of Handke's plays, They Are Dying Out presents one of his most fascinating protagonists, Quitt, a businessman who first induces a group of colleagues to set up a monopoly and then torpedoes the scheme. The four short plays that round out the book--Prophecy, Calling for Help, Quodlibet, and My Foot My Tutor--were written before The Ride Across Lake Constance and show Handke moving from the experimental mode of his early work toward the richness and complexity that have marked him as the most important dramatist since Becket."--Publisher description.

Discover the beautiful stories of Michael Morpurgo, author of Warhorse and the nation’s favourite storyteller A heart-warming novel about Kaspar the Savoy cat, from the award-winning author of Born to Run and The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips

This book considers a spectrum of post-war plays in which characters are created, coerced and destroyed by language.

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

This collection from Austria's best-known playwright includes Offending the Audience, My Foot My Tutor, Self-Accusation, Kaspar, The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They Are Dying Out.

In the Cambodian hinterlands, a lone Western prisoner suffers through a hot, muddy, interminable sentence. Wasted by repeated torture, lack of sleep, malnutrition, and psychotropic drugs, he has been abandoned. His years of exemplary service to his government mean nothing. No one is coming for him. This is Agent Kasper, a man with a staggering résumé: commercial airline pilot, firearms expert, highly accomplished practitioner of several of the martial arts, a secret agent par excellence. It is this incredible competence that will be his undoing. While investigating Mafia money laundering in Phnom Penh, Kasper is approached by the CIA to track down the source of the so-called supernotes—illegal U.S. banknotes counterfeited so perfectly that they are undetectable, even by sophisticated machines—that are flooding Southeast Asia. With patience, skill, and courage, Kasper uncovers the explosive secret behind them and is badly burned by the truth. Meanwhile, back in Rome, a sharp, scrappy lawyer named Barbara Belli has been hired by Kasper’s family to work for his release. She has contacts in the foreign ministry, and while officials make sweeping claims about moving heaven and earth, nothing happens. It’s more than just creaking bureaucracy. Kasper has really pissed off the wrong people. Based on true events in the life of a former spy, Kasper’s journey makes for a shocking and spellbinding page-turner of petty corruption, high-level betrayal, and state secrets so powerful that governments will protect them by any means.

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.

"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.

This collection contains six fascinating comedies by the avant-garde playwright, Robert Reichardt. Each is unique in its subject matter, and dazzling in originality. ORANGE LIPS AND THE BARBECUE PEOPLE answers the question about what happens to people when they wind up in Purgatory -- that in-between place described by Dante. Do they just sit and wait? No, they barbecue and run the lives of selected people still on Earth. A group of obnoxious barbecue people get involved with the family of Kenny "Orange Lips" Jung, and this leads to riotous conflict. ECHO AND THE CAMOUFLAGE, is set in modern Chicago, and is loosely based on the Greek Myth of Echo, Narcissus, and Queen Hera. A young blind girl, Echo Seltsam, is suddenly cured and transformed by a miracle into The Blue Lady -- a person of unlimited power. What she does with it, and how it effects her narcissistic, camouflage-wearing Father, Jerry, and others provides the comic structure of the play. The short play, KAREN, THE FUSE LADY, describes a bizarre Summer "romance" in a cheap Chicago tenement, as a young renter becomes involved with his neurotic neighbor. He battles to save his electricity (and sanity) from a woman who has other ideas about how he should live his life. HAT-P-1, OR A BIG CRUNCH. After scientists predict the Universe will soon end in a "Big Crunch," a group gathers in an affluent Chicago suburb for a black-tie party to comfort one another. It doesn't work out that way. The guests soon discover a lot about one another (not much of it good), and engage in various forms of escapism -- primarily focused on unrealistic thoughts about going to HAT-P-1, a newly discovered gigantic planet so light and fluffy it would float on water.