¶The first of Handke's novels to appear in English: the New York edition was published in 1972, coinciding with Wim Wenders's film adaptation. A bizarre novella about a murderer in an Austrian border town. While deserving of its frequent comparisons with Camus's L'Etranger, it is a twentieth-century classic in its own right. The scene in which the titular goalie explains to an acquaintance the futile second-guessing involved in attempting to save a penalty is somehow as illuminating and chilling as anything in Kafka or Ligotti. Handke was one of the 2019 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, provoking a degree of controversy.