Thomas Dylan Eaton
Peter Handke is an acclaimed and prolific author of novels, plays, essays, and poems. A cultural icon of postwar Germany and Austria, he garnered an early reputation as a provocateur with works like Offending the Audience (1966) and Self-Accusation (1966). Handke was internationally acclaimed as a gifted prose stylist, with ruminative, extended sentences that had what John Updike called a “knifelike clarity of evocation.” Later in his career, Handke became embroiled in controversy as he became an outspoken supporter of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars, downplayed the fact that Serbian paramilitaries committed genocide during the conflict, and spoke at the 
During the drained-out years of the 1960s and ’70s, when there was no public outlet for a frank conversation, Homo sovieticus would gather with friends in a Moscow kitchen, identical in shape and size to those in concrete apartment blocks all over the USSR. The radio would be turned to full volume, drowning out loose talk that might otherwise escape through pre-fabricated walls. The décor would display only muffled colors—the mediocre browns and grays of the Soviet everyday. On a shelf: a three-litre jar of birch juice, pickled cucumbers and a gray salami procured for a special occasion. The clothing