The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

<p><b>The first of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, <i>The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick </i>is a true modern classic that "portrays the…breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's <i>The Stranger</i>" (<i>The New York Times). </i></b><br><br>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 "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (<i>Boston Sunday Globe). <br><br></i></p>