Short Letter, Long Farewell

“The Austrian novelist Peter Handke is known for his fictional meditations on the uneasy relationship between language and reality. These three interrelated stories are ‘the work of a totally serious major artist,' Malcolm Bradbury said here in 1985. 'He believes in writing as an artistic and philosophical inquiry, a search into forms.'” –The New York Times “The three works comprising Slow Homecoming are closer to a true dialectic than Handke’s work has ever before sought.” –American Book Review “This is a postmodernism in its most exciting and challenging form, a work of literature that makes the redefinition of reality and of fiction a possibility.” –Choice “Handke’s self-portrait of the artist [leaves] us with doubts that can only be induced by the work of a totally serious major artist.” –Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review "Handke is a prolific writer of plays, poetry, short stories, literary essays and scripts for television and film...Handke orders in a language so powerful and self-possessed - and marvelously translated by Ralph Manheim - without ever being precious or self-conscious, that it creates an imagined awareness a leap beyond what we thought possible. A rich and delicate gift, before which the reader both spins and stands still." –The San Francisco Chronicle “A leading literary figure in the first generation of Germans to grow up after the war...He is a man of real intellectual power and sometimes visionary insight. His fingers are never far from the pulse...“ –The Washington Post ______________________________________________ PRAISE FOR HANDKE “One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers.” –Lawrence Graver, The New York Times “Peter Handke…perhaps the most interesting young writer in German today.” –Frank Kermode "There is no denying Handke's willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. He writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebblesÉThe best writer, altogether, in his language." –John Updike, The New Yorker "His experimental poetry and anarchic, anti-authoritarian work win him a following among Germany's left-wing `1968ers'. Handke aims to strip away unnecessary words and challenge linguistic conventions, developing a spare, robust prose style." –The Guardian "IMAGINE a cross between Holden Caulfield and Bertolt Brecht, and you'll have a sense of the Austrian novelist, playwright and screenwriter Peter Handke, whose alienation from the phony and harmful adult world is as pure as his esthetic purity is purposefully alienating...As it happened, Handke ended up writing social criticism with a vengeance...though to some degree time-bound tales of angst, have a pained, mysterious beauty. Their alluring tension lies in the little war they prosecute between eloquence of expression and rage at the loss of meaning." –The New York Times "Peter Handke made his reputation as an important writer with a fierce, icy set of plays and novels: Offending the Audience, Kaspar, The Ride Across Lake Constance, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. Oblique yet startlingly immediate, these works embodied in fresh fictional and dramatic forms concerns that seemed particularly postmodern, notably an obsession (indeed, a disgust) with the way language itself defines and constricts human possibilities." –The New York Times “The David Byrne of fiction: a writer with a resonant, powerfully direct voice who could invoke the par