> Skip to content
  • Published: 6 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141993614
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick




One of 2019 Nobel Laureate for Literature's most important works, a spare and haunting novel of alienation

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 the dislocation and déjà vu of modern twentieth-century life.

  • Published: 6 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141993614
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

Also by Peter Handke

See all

Praise for The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

A seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world

Boston Sunday Globe

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

Richard Locke, The New York Times

One of Europe's great writers

Karl Ove Knausgaard

The author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior

WG Sebald