Handke often emphasizes not an event but, rather, a seemingly minor moment, the significance of which the person who experiences it does not even recognize . . . At their most successful, [Handke's stories] convey the impression that they already exist in nature, and the job of the writer is only to excavate them. –Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker
"[Peter Handke] is widening the frontier of personal narrative. Shuttling between fiction and essay, he is making what feels like a new form, a kind of associative philosophical meditation that both maps and manifests the movements of mind . . . Each [essay] is a contained language event."
–Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review The persistence of memory, a sense of alienation from oneself, and self-consciousness about one's writing process all come to the fore in these erudite essays from Nobel Prize winner Handke . . . Handke's essays are existential and weighty, his writing wordy and winding, and he's always richly imaginative.
–Publishers Weekly
