The first of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that portrays the...breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's The Stranger (The New York Times).

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 (Boston Sunday Globe).