Quiet Places

A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in English
Quiet Places brings together Peter Handke's forays into the border regions of life and story, upending the distinction between literature and the literary essay. Proceeding from the specificity of place (the mountains of Carinthia and Spain, the hinterlands of Paris) to specific objects (the jukebox, the boletus mushroom) to the irreducible particularity of our moods and mental impressions, these works--each a novella in its own right--offer rare insight into the affinities that can develop between a storyteller and the unlikeliest of subjects. Here, Handke does for European letters what Joan Didion did for American journalism, positing a reevaluation of the possibilities and proper concerns of literature in a style unmistakably his own.