Second Sword / My Day in the Other Land : A Tale from the Merry Month of May / A Tale of Demons

Handke, Peter; Winston, Krishna (TRN)

ISBN 10: 1250371880 / ISBN 13: 9781250371881

Published by Picador, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 49201221-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Second Sword / My Day in the Other Land : A Tale from the Merry Month of May / A Tale of Demons
• Publisher: Picador
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1250371880
• ISBN 13: 9781250371881
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Two novellas by Peter Handke―his first works to be published since he won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are two novellas by the 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke. The first picks up the story where Handke’s last work of fiction, The Fruit Thief (described in The New York Times as “an experience of unadulterated literature”), left off. Here a man has returned to his home in the suburbs of Paris, only to soon set out again. Why? We learn, over the course of a story redolent of Handke’s harrowing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that he is seeking to avenge his mother, who has been unjustly denounced in the pages of a newspaper. The Second Sword is a suspenseful work of self-examination: Will the narrator’s journey end in him throwing down the gauntlet?

My Day in the Other Land is the first work written by Handke after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Evoking imagery from the Bible and classical mythology, it portrays a man who has been possessed by demons, causing him to rage endlessly against the inhabitants of his rural village. Aided by his sister, he embarks on a journey to a lake on whose opposite shore lies the “other land.” What ensues is an exorcism of sorts―and one of Handke’s most evocative and original endings. Together, The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are essential new entries in a body of work like no other.

About the Authors

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Krishna Winston is the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University. She has translated more than thirty books, including previous works by Peter Handke and works by Werner Herzog, Günter Grass, Christoph Hein, and Goethe.